March 30th: Andrea Bajani in conversation with Edmund White

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Andrea Bajani will discuss his new book If You Kept a Record of Sins with Edmund White.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, March 30th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.

Andrea Bajani—If You Kept a Record of Sins (Archipelago, 2021)

A sly, prismatic novel that Jhumpa Lahiri says “accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm,” by Andrea Bajani, whom Michael Cunningham calls “a true original.” 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.

“Andrea Bajani’s haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm. The impact is shattering, pure.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri

“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

Andrea Bajani is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. His works have been translated into many languages and published by some of the most prestigious European publishers, such as Gallimard, Siruela, MacLehose, Atheneum, DTV, Humanitas. He now lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.

Photo credit:Andrew Fladeboe

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, Our Young Man, and most recently, A Saint From Texas. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the National Book Foundation’s 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York.