• If You Kept a Record of Sins
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Archipelago Books

If You Kept a Record of Sins

If You Kept a Record of Sins

by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris

$18.00
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Available as E-Book Italian Literature
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If You Kept a Record of Sins records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she’s building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life—when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother’s mysterious, mythical invention. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother’s funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today’s Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810960
Pages: 200
Publication Date:

Praise

Andrea Bajani’s haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm. The impact is shattering, pure. With themes of distance and dislocation at its heart, this celebrated novel by one of Italy’s most talented young writers now resonates in English thanks to Elizabeth Harris’ limpid translation.
—Jhumpa Lahiri

If You Kept a Record of Sins is written with grace and calm control. It deals with loss, especially the loss of a mother, with a chiseled sense of truth. Each image and each moment are captured with exquisite emotional accuracy. The connection between the past and the present is dramatized with skill. The protagonist is, like the author himself, someone on whom nothing is lost.
—Colm Tóibín

Andrea Bajani’s If You Kept a Record of Sins is a beautiful, original, and deeply moving work of art. It would be a gift at any time in history and is all the more so now, as the world moves through one of its darker periods.
—Michael Cunningham

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