The Book of Homes

This lush narrative from Bajani (If You Kept a Record of Sins) tells the story of a man’s life through a succession of northern Italian homes. The novel begins in 1976 when the protagonist, named I, is a baby crawling across the carpet of his parents’ basement apartment, which he calls the Underground Home. As I grows up, he spends time in such formative places as the Home Beneath the Mountain, the condo in the Alps that he moves into at eight; the Home of Sex, the family apartment of the girl he loses his virginity to in 1991; and the Home of the Tumor, the hospital room where his mother is treated for breast cancer in 2007. The nonlinear narrative also finds him living in such transient settings as his car, the homes of relatives, and a college dorm, before he rents his first apartment in 1998. Much more atmospheric than plot driven, Bajani’s novel plays with language and structure in inventive ways, from impressions of the Underground Home, where “shadows slip off the objects entirely, dive onto the floor, subdue every square centimeter,” to his home on wheels, a “Fiat Panda, white, with a flirtatious flurry of stickers.” It’s a memorable tale of a man shaped by the walls around him. (Aug.)