Andrea Bajani

This edition of From Our Eyes features Taylor Love (‘25 Creative Writing). Love attended the 2025 John Fowles Reading Series featuring Italian author Andrea Bajani. Bajani is an award-winning novelist of contemporary Italian and European literature. He is best known for this novel, Se consider le colpe (Einaudi, 2007), published in English as If you Kept a Record of Sins (Archipelago, 2021). 

On a quiet evening in the Henley Reading Room at Chapman University’s Leatherby Libraries, Andrea Bajani read from his novel If You Kept a Record of Sins. The room was lined with warm lamplight and filled slowly with students, faculty, and visitors, each settling into their chairs with a quiet attention. I had read the book before, but hearing Bajani read from it added a different texture to the experience—his voice deliberate, almost hesitant, as if trying to honor the gaps between the words as much as the words themselves.

The novel, translated from Italian to English in 2021, focuses on a son’s attempt to reconnect with the memory of his estranged mother after her death. If You Kept a Record of Sins unfolds through fragments and a unique second-person address that avoids neat conclusions and centers around grief, distance, and the limits of language. During the Q&A, Bajani spoke about this distance, noting how, oftentimes, silence shapes what we remember as much as speech does.

When it was my turn to ask a question, I asked about the narrator of the story, who Bajani described as a part of himself, and his ethical or existential responsibility in reconstructing a relationship with his mother, the fictional equivalent of Bajani’s grandmother, after her death. Does the act of remembering—however incomplete—become a form of complicity, resistance, or both?

Pausing for a moment, Bajani answered simply: “Both.”  He spoke about the dual nature of memory and writing—that to remember is to take part in shaping someone else’s story (which is always an act of both fidelity and invention). The narrator—and, by extension, Bajani himself—was not positioned as having a clear moral duty. Rather, he pointed to the complexity of trying to write about someone who can no longer respond. The act—he suggested—is always a bit fraught. But it is necessary.

He also mentioned something that stuck with me—that his goal in writing is always to make the reader feel like the work was written just for them, not in the sense of offering easy relatability, but of being drawn into the emotional logic of the text, in creating the feeling of being directly addressed. This idea helped me think about the novel’s use of the second person and investigation into memory in a new way, not just as a stylistic choice, but as a kind of quiet invitation.

As a student who spends a lot of time reading and thinking about literature, this perspective reshaped how I approach texts. I’ve often focused on interpretation or analysis, but Bajani reminded me of the emotional contract between writer and reader. Since the event, I’ve found myself wondering not just what a text means, but how it speaks to me—and how I might respond. That small shift has made reading feel more personal and more alive.

It’s also affected my own writing. As a creative writing student, I’m constantly thinking about structure, character, and form—but often with the pressure to be clever or polished. Bajani’s approach reminded me that writing doesn’t always have to offer resolution. Sometimes its power lies in what it chooses not to say. Since hearing him speak, I’ve found myself more willing to leave space in my work for uncertainty, for silence, for the reader to fill in. I’ve been thinking more about the emotional shape of a piece, not just its architecture. And I’ve been asking myself: does this piece feel like it was written for someone? Not in a literal sense, but in the way it reaches out.

What I appreciated most about Bajani’s talk was his openness to uncertainty. He didn’t present writing—or memory—as a solution to grief. Instead, he talked about it as a process of staying with questions, of resisting closure. The novel doesn’t seek to resolve the narrator’s feelings about his mother. It gives space to them.

As people filtered out of the reading room at the end of the event, there was a sense that the conversation wasn’t over. Bajani’s work—and the way he spoke about it—invited further thought, not final answers. And that’s what good writing does: it lingers, quietly, asking you to come back to it—not to solve it, but to listen again, and more closely.