If you kept a record of sins

A young man traces his mother's footsteps toward her tragic end in Bajani's somber and gripping tale of abandonment and exploitation (after Every Promise). Lorenzo arrives in Bucharest to handle the affairs of his recently deceased mother, Lula, who abandoned him and his stepfather years earlier. Addressed to his mother, Lorenzo's narration interweaves the tale of his own broken home with revelations about his mother's demise and insights into decades of oppression under the Ceaușescu regime. At a factory in Bucharest, Lorenzo meets Lula's former lover, Anselmi, with whom Lula had partnered on a business venture involving a gimmicky weight-loss device. In flashbacks, the reader learns Lula was shunned by her parents, an early betrayal that seems to foretell her later choices. Later, when an adulterous affair results in Lorenzo's birth, the biological father vanishes. "And so he signed his last name and left it there," Lorenzo says of that man, "like a lizard leaves its tail and scuttles off somewhere to grow it back." Here and throughout, family trauma parallels the collective trauma of an oppressed people, with no solace in the past and no real agency in the future. Bajani brings the full weight of his qualities as a poet, journalist, and professor of European Studies to bear, revealing in finely wrought prose the lasting scars of heartbreak on his characters and the body politic. This is deeply affecting. (Mar.)

After years of gradually widening distance between them, a man learns some truths about his absent mother when he travels abroad to bury her and settle her business affairs. Lula, the enigmatic and estranged daughter of a conventional and well-to-do Italian family, fled Italy for Romania and the opportunity to grow a business in the "Wild West" atmosphere of the post-Ceaușescu years. Left behind with a "Dad" who was not his father--and who is also part of Lula's collateral damage--Lula's young son, Lorenzo, grows up with his memories of a loving and playful mother and a growing resignation to her absence. A short (and often surreal) trip to Bucharest to attend Lula's funeral and unravel aspects of her personal and business affairs provides Lorenzo, as a young man, with subtle clues about the realities of his mother's life in a country struggling to move forward after years of repression. Bajani's spare prose delivers startling imagery--Lula's business manufactures and sells a weight-loss machine that resembles a giant egg, and one of her confederates runs a business which is, essentially, a coffin farm--as well as quiet reflection as Lorenzo addresses the departed Lula as he moves around her chosen home away from home. Lorenzo finds evidence of himself along the trail of Lula's shattered relationships and works to answer questions about their broken bond through a lens of adult, rather than childlike, understanding. Psalm 130, which lends the novel its title and is awkwardly read at Lula's funeral, asks "If you kept a record of sins, oh Lord, who could stand before you?" a reminder that there is usually enough fault to go around. Bajani's lovely, quiet novel lives at the intersection of love and misunderstanding. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Afterword by Edmund White This astonishingly powerful novel produces its unforgettable effects not through the narrator's thoughts or analysis nor through illuminating or thematic dialogue. I suppose careless reviewers might compare it to Hemingway, but the narrator is not tight-lipped nor stoic nor particularly brave physically, nor does the style, chaste though it might be, have the Dick-and-Jane simplicity Hemingway inherited from Gertrude Stein, her simple, repetitious, adjective-starved prose. No, this heartbreaking book of loss and sullen, lonely maturity proceeds through its own devices, especially the careful, stripped-bare presentation of key visual images, which the reader must reconstruct (effortlessly) into a straightforward story. A young mother with a son, Lorenzo, gets together with a reliable, harmless man in order to provide the boy with a father--and eventually to free herself to become an entrepreneur with a more exciting partner in business and love. This enterprise takes her for longer and longer spells to Romania, recently liberated from its dictator, which people compare to the Wild West for its free-for-all competition and make-or-break economy. As the book begins she has just died and Lorenzo, now an adult, goes to Bucharest for the funeral and to settle her part of the manufacturing business. Lorenzo has had no physical contact with her for many, many years. Now he learns she lived out the end of her life in squalor, alone and self-destructive, betrayed by her lover and business partner, who abandoned her for a younger woman. Only chance remarks fill him in on his mother's gradual degradation. This novel, translated into English by Elizabeth Harris, comes to us covered with Italian prizes and the praise of such diverse writers as Antonio Tabucchi, Emmanuèl Carrére, and Michael Cunningham. Bajani, only in his mid-forties, has already written half-a-dozen works of fiction and a book-length essay, taught creative writing and worked for an Italian publishing house. The stunning visual scenes include seeing the Bucharest skyline and the huge palace of the Parliament, The People's Palace built but never completed by the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who ruled Romania from 1967 to 1989 and was executed along with his wife after a hasty trial (the last occurrences of capital punishment in Romania). Ceauşescu lived in another palace called "The Palace of the Spring," which was decorated in a style that might have appealed to Trump (huge gold-plated bathrooms and a Louis XV bedroom). The Parliament Palace, according to Wikipedia, is the heaviest building in the world and so large it can be seen from the moon, a Romanian chauffeur proudly claims. Lorenzo and the chauffeur tour the People's Palace; the guide deluges them with statistics (miles of marble, tons of crystal, etc). The grandiosity and cruelty and exaltation of those Christmas days of Revolution animate this novel. The Romanians are crude--"You Italians like Romanian pussy"--but the Italians are sometimes worse--"Did you ever ask yourself why your mother didn't come home? Did you ever ask yourself why?" Italian entrepreneurs despise the Romanian workers--"These people--we yanked them right out of the Middle Ages." No reader of If You Kept a Record of Sins can ever forget the scene when Lorenzo is in the country visiting Viarengo, an Italian friend of his mother: "There before us was a meadow, and in the grass, a long stretch of coffins . . . laid in the sun, one after the other, like a battalion of dead soldiers, killed god knows where. They're all of the finest quality, he said. Same goes for the one I built for your mother, he added." Viarengo recalls that Lorenzo's mother liked to lie down in a coffin. "She'd say, Let's see what dying's like, and then she'd start laughing." Now Lorenzo climbs into a coffin and starts laughing; it feels as if he's playing with his mother again after all these years. Throughout the book Lorenzo addresses his dead mother as "you." Lorenzo's boyhood memories are of his beloved but usually absent mother returning sporadically with souvenirs from all over the world: "They were from every country, every corner on earth, my room, trip after trip, becoming the world map of your absence." Her weekly phone calls and monthly visits tail off; Lorenzo goes for years with only a phone call at Christmas from his mother. Journalists say one can write better about a new city after three days rather than three months. It's true that observations are the sharpest after a very short time. Lorenzo is no exception: "All around was Bucharest, buildings of reinforced concrete crammed together along the boulevard, and a background noise I didn't recognize, as though even the traffic spoke a language other than my own." No wonder Bajani's technique of presenting strong visual images with a minimum of moralizing works so well; all of Lorenzo's impressions are fresh. Excerpted from If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.