After browsing a local bookstore, I picked up a promising Italian novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, by Andrea Bajani. It had much going for it, starting with the quality, style and the great paper used by its excellent publisher (Archipelago Books), and its back cover was covered with high praise from the likes of Richard Ford, Colm Tóibín, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Cunningham. When I spoke with a fine bookseller who once worked for Vicky and I, Michael was beaming because he’d chosen the book for the store.

Richard Ford writes about how the book was “eccentric and impassioned, but also frequently oblique, startling and provocative, visits and revisits me, always leaving me slightly shaken, but also mindful of why novels are all the more an essential form in our conduct of life, and in our efforts to see life clearly.” It was Jhumpa Lahiri who said, “Andrea Bajani’s haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm. The impact is shattering, pure.”

Lahiri’s comment points at a book that tells of the scars that remain with the man, Lorenzo, after his mother, Lula, abandoned the young boy many years ago in Italy. In the freewheeling years after Ceaușescu’s fall from power, she had traveled to Romania to build a business that created and marketed a giant egg that people climbed into for weight-loss. The man is now left with the small bits of his childhood’s happy memories, when the mother and son would wrestle, laugh, and have fun together.

The book begins many years later, with Lorenzo, now a man, traveling alone to Romania for his mother’s funeral, and to settle up her business affairs. He finds an unsettling, deceitful, and disconcerting strangeness loose in the modern world. He also meets a number of people, like a chauffeur, and his mother’s business partner and lover, Anselmi, all who knew his mother in very different ways than he ever did. Anselmi is a loud, vulgar man who already has a new girlfriend to replace Lorenzo’s mother. The story revealed is one of his mother’s last years, a tale of alcohol abuse and her lack of any concern about her own health. She had become someone who people avoided. The story is a difficult tale of an abandonment that flavors much of Lorenzo’s life. At the same time the man is finding some of his sentimental childhood memories being shattered by other revelations about his family.

There are many flashbacks in the book, and many times it felt as if Lorenzo simply didn’t want to return from the distant past to a present that he found so wanting. There’s a loneliness to this story. Misunderstandings and the longtime distance between mother and son never had any chance to recover. Their very last phone call was a Christmas call with a horrible connection, one where she simply hung up before he could respond. Imagine the effect of that on a small child.

One of the book’s reviews spoke of our author believing that our lives are primarily defined by the traumas we endure; and that only some are able to pick up the pieces and move on. Also, that words like forgiveness and redemption are just buzzwords for those who try foolishly to deny life’s awful truths. It’s hard to take any comfort from that view of life. Another review wrote that this was a quiet novel that lives at the intersection of love and misunderstanding. However one comes away from this book, it’s guaranteed to make an impression with it sparse writing style and haunting story. ( )

Un libro breve, si legge in due ore, ma intense. Un giovane uomo va in Romania per seppellire la madre, che era andata là anni prima con un amante e un sogno di successo e ricchezza. La storia è imperniata su questo distacco, soffertissimo, ma non è una storia di dis-amore, come per esempio La pioggia prima che cada . E' un libro di amore e sull'amore. Veramente bello, e veramente diverso, aiuta a conoscere - attraverso una storia privata - il mondo degli imprenditori "emigrati" nei paesi dell'Est europeo, e quello che gli ruota attorno. La scrittura è costruita su un "tu" particolarissimo, raro in letteratura. Secondo me una scrittura straordinaria.

De cultuurclash en de confrontatie met een onbekende moeder zijn er, maar de schok moet je erbij denken. Wie houdt dan stand? is confronterend, in een zekere zin, maar ook zeer subtiel. Bijna krachteloos.
Volledige bespreking via http://wraakvandedodo.blogspot.com/2010/02/andrea-bajani-wie-houdt-dan-stand.htm... ( )