If You Kept a Record of Sins

December 15, 2020
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.

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Starred review from January 25, 2021
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.