Andrea Bajani

El llibre de les cases és la narració fragmentada de la vida d’un home, de les seves amistats, els amors, les decepcions, la poesia que l’acompanya, la història familiar. És el compendi dels seus últims cinquanta anys a través de les cases que ha habitat, dels espais que el configuren. Andrea Bajani ha creat una obra delicada i poètica sobre una vida en construcció, sobre la seva arquitectura real, els seus interiors i els llocs que ens formen com a persones.

Aquesta novel·la, finalista del premi Strega 2021, és una educació sentimental sobre qui som i quin rastre deixem allà on vivim.… (mais)

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.… (mais)