Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris, Archipelago Books, 2021
A young Italian man, abandoned by his mother as a child, travels to Romania for her funeral. This is the deceptively simple story of Andrea Bajani’s beautiful, unsentimental, haunting, and haunted novel, If I Kept a Record of Sins. First published in Italian in 2007, Bajani’s novel, his first, was highly lauded, winning a number of literary prizes. Against the backdrop of formerly communist Romania, with Ceausescu’s palace looming in the background, Lorenzo uncovers the story of his mother’s ambitions, her disappointments, and her disgrace. Narrating in first person, Lorenzo describes his present journey, meeting with his mother’s friends and associates in Romania, while witnessing the influx of greedy Italian capitalists into the “Wild West” of a demoralized, exploited Romania. In alternate chapters, Lorenzo chronicles his childhood memories of his mother, but speaking to the reader as if the reader were his mother: “The way you left that last time, it was clear you wouldn’t be coming back. Just hearing you say, I’ll be back soon, your way to avoid explaining yourself […] I didn’t go to you, like I always did when you were leaving, running to you, partly a declaration of war, partly begging you to take me along […] I knew I had to stay. So I stood beside the couch, watching you leave […] I stood there, not moving, a few meters from you, staring, like a dog that knows it has to stay home. And like a dog, I stared at the closed door, when you were no longer there.” (pg. 153-154) By implicating the reader in Lorenzo’s drama, Bajani heightens the feelings of longing, loneliness, joy, sadness – the erotics of the mother/son relationship – and the anger and despair of abandonment. In the simple direct prose and construction of this slim novel, Bajani connects an historical moment with these most painful, intimate emotions. The progress of the novel juxtaposes two opposing movements: Lorenzo’s moving toward his mother and her world, with Lorenzo’s mother moving away from Lorenzo and his world. Through these overlapping movements, Lorenzo begins to pull together the threads of his life, allowing him a greater understanding of, and identification with, his mother’s ambitions and with her tragedy. As he progresses through his journey, Lorenzo’s moral sensibility sharpens as he experiences the demoralization of Romania while learning about his mother’s humiliation. In this not quite 200 page novel, Bajani interweaves moral, emotional, and political themes, revealing connections between the personal and the historical. The progress of the book fuses Lorenzo’s political and psychoanalytic insights, gained through his reflection of his past as he gradually realizes the moral bankruptcy of the world his mother left him for. This allows him, at the climax of the novel, to make a choice, a real choice, as an adult, honoring himself and his mother. Lorenzo achieves a wary maturity through the gradual realization of the reality of his mother, not just the maternal figure who abandoned him, but the ambitious, rebellious, self destructive woman who wanted more than what she got. Bajani expresses this through writing that is itself mature; that is, without sentimentality or melodrama. Rather, he evokes the emotional complexity of Lorenzo’s situation with a poetic sensibility, writing simply and directly, showing us (not telling us) through combinations of images how painfully sad, angry, relieving, joyous it is to begin to reconcile with one’s past. And how that reconciliation clears one’s moral confusion. This is a beautifully, painfully written book. That it took fourteen years for it to be translated into English, that we are just now being able to read this marvelous writer, indicates how much great untranslated literature there is waiting to be discovered in the English reading world.
