If You Kept a Record of Sins

This was an incredibly readable novella, but one that left me a little conflicted. We start as our hero arrives at Bucharest airport, and before we even know his gender or the nature of the person he's addressing in his second person monologue of a narration, we see him picked up by his mother's chauffeur, and carted off to do all the necessary introductions before said mother is buried the following day. The mother was a businesswoman, who clearly settled in Romania with her (night-time and business) partner, and feelings of abandonment are still strong. And so we flit from current (well, this came out in the original Italian in 2007, so moderately current) Bucharest, to the lad's childhood, and see just what he has to tell her as a private farewell address.

And this is where the confliction lies. The piece seems so heartfelt, such a bitter elegy, but at times the bitterness seems really unfounded. Our narrator at times appears to have been what might be summarised as an Oedipal plonker, literally wrestling with his mummy when she's cleaving herself from the family she's built, and clearly hating the fact a new man came along that to this day he can hardly ever mention him by name – it's 99% "your partner" instead. How very dare she fail at the marriage (not the only time, we find out). How very very dare she be an Italian woman who is also an entrepreneur and not a stay-at-home feeder of mummy's boy.

What the piece also annoyed me with was the racism in here. This, I admit, is a bit more of a character's voice than the author's, but it does smack of anti-Eastern Europe bigotry when not only Bucharest but Poland and several other countries get lumped in as excessively poor, and a place where the mother can do virtue tourism, doling out charity en route to making a fortune with her Brundle-capsules – half-sauna, half womb-like things supposed to work as weight-loss machines. The chauffeur becomes a fixer struggling to get the funeral done right, and because it's not Italy it's not the sending-off anyone would want. Bucharest is a place of beggars, stray dogs, and skinny secretary characters discussing Italian men's taste for pussy as an opening gambit.

So, there's confliction. Especially as this can be a wonderful read. It feels quiet, with this measured monologue guiding us through everything. It lumps us with really quite emotional scenes – the narrator as a young boy finding his own mother to have a feeling of abandonment too, as an intercom separates them from him ever knowing his grandfather in a one-off attempt at a visit; the chauffeur's last shared cigarette with his employer – but cushions them all in a measured, calm envelope befitting the fact this is a man talking to his estranged and very dead mother. It does get a little bit woolly, perhaps by default, when he overstays his intended brief time in Romania, but it's a book that is full of the shockingly memorable, and for a caustic lament of a bloke still quibbling about the end of his childhood decades on, is really entertaining. A strong four stars.

I was excited to read this book after reading Bajani's Un Bien al Mundo (title in Spanish translation). This novel is quite different, following the main character as he travels to Romania for his mother's funeral; his mother effectively abandoned him in Italy at a young age for her international business and his relationship with her was complicated. All this unfolds in quiet, understated but aching prose that presents a full and complex picture of the main character's life and time in Romania, without moralizing. I especially enjoyed the depiction of the main character as a foreigner experiencing the foreign country for the first time.

What a searing, beautifully written love/hate letter from a young man to his mother. Soon to be published in English translation, If You Kept a Record of Sins has won several awards in its original Italian. Set in modern-day industrial Romania, the son Lorenzo’s fractured relationship with his mother echoes Romania’s struggles toward and with independence. This novel spurred me on to learn more about Romanian history and how recent Italian business investments there have changed the country.

Lorenzo’s honest record of his loneliness, anger and memories, both good and bitter, are mirrored in the Romanian characters’ conflicted attitudes toward their world-famous Palace of the Parliament. “You can even see it from the moon…It’s not like you can see just anything from the moon, he said, and he wore an expression of pride, for the visibility of the Ceausescu Palace, but his face also showed disappointment, and this was much more private. As though, from the moon, the two of us couldn’t be seen, so there was no use in raising your arms, no use screaming and waving hello.”

Andrea Bajani’s unsparing prose somehow lets us look with kindness on the characters, their faults and their good intentions. Each character is fully there. “If you kept a record of sins, oh Lord, oh Lord, who could stand?”

Highly recommended.

Thank you to Archipelago for the opportunity to review the ARC via Netgalley.

Truly a beautiful piece of literature. The author is able to grasp a sense of longing, of grief, and the complicated nature/layers that go into a relationship between a mother and a son. The storyline moves slowly, but it actually fits with the flashbacks and the subject matter. The only thing that I was left wanting more from this book is a clearer/cleaner sense of character development. But, on the other hand, sometimes it feels that the adult Lorenzo is still perceiving the present, adult world with the same level of development and abandonment as the child longing for his mother to return that is so vivid in the flashbacks. I typically don't enjoy books that have been translated, but in this case the prose is elegant in English, so I can only imagine how moving they are in Italian.

A short but really affecting novel about an Italian mother who abandons her partner, and more importantly, her son, to start a new business in the recently liberated Romania. As Lorenzo the son travels to the country after his mother’s death he reflects on the past and the effect the loss of his mother had on him, learning more about what happened to her after she’d left. It’s a quiet book, the prose spare and measured, the atmosphere melancholy and haunting. My only quibble is that the mother’s business venture is based on a somewhat surreal product which jarred – although perhaps its very weirdness chimed in with the Wild West nature of the emerging Romanian economy. That apart I was firmly hooked form the first page and very much enjoyed this sad little book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Archipelago for the ebook. This slim novel is pretty remarkable. Lorenzo, a young man from Italy, has just gotten of a plane in Romania to attend his mother’s funeral. Lorenzo and his mother were so close when he was young, but then his mother becomes empowered as she creates a company that sells a weight loss device and it starts selling all over the world. Once a factory is built in Romania, his mother starts to take longer and longer trips there until she seems to inevitably slip out of Lorenzo’s life except for a few phone calls a year. Lorenzo goes for her funeral, but also to look for clues to who his mother became and to try and figure out why she left him, but sometimes the silence of the dead speaks volumes, but leaves too many dead ends.