A Son's Twenty-Year Ordeal
A son leaves home for university and pays fortnightly visits to his parents for 20 years, dreading each encounter due to his father's oppressive control and mother's passivity. Then he changes his phone number and cuts off all contact. Andrea Bajani's The Anniversary is narrated by this son, a decade after the rupture, which he calls the happiest period of his life.
Critical and Commercial Success
The novel won Italy's top literary prize and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It has been praised for shattering taboos about family loyalty, especially in Italy where the Godfather-like ideal of absolute family loyalty persists. However, reviewer Lara Feigel finds the novel simpler and quieter than expected, exposing truths already known: fathers can be oppressive, mothers powerless, children damaged, and therapists helpful.
Bajani's Previous Ambitious Works
Bajani's earlier novels, The Book of Homes and Every Promise, were more ambitious in scale and theme. The Anniversary retains experimental momentum through its commitment to the "thinking machine of the novel." It is structured as a memoir but the narrator insists it must be a novel because his mother's self-effacement requires invention to rescue her. Bajani has called this a political act—giving voice to a silenced victim of patriarchy.
Fragmentary Memories and Analysis
The novel comprises fragmentary memories of the narrator's mother, accompanied by precise analysis. He recalls her invisibility in the kitchen, her brief animation with friends before his father isolated her, and how during rare physical violence from his father, she became more powerful, "fully present in her own life." The attempt to bring a denuded personality to life is impressive, and the enterprise of giving the mother space in the book is generous and original.
Therapeutic Framing as a Flaw
Despite its merits, the book feels predictably reliant on therapy. The narrator finds an eccentric, quasi-maternal therapist who becomes central, available by phone day or night. Framed therapeutically, his childhood becomes a story of abuse, with parents too schematic and extreme to sustain interest. Unlike in Every Promise, little is shown of his current life, and the past is overdetermined.
Unreliable Narration and Ambivalence
The protagonist remains obsessed with his estranged parents, enough to write the book. Feigel wonders if Bajani intended him as an unreliable narrator, whose confidence in rupture is belied by his fascination. The narrator acknowledges the cruelty of his mission: "If there is filial piety in me, it is in the pitilessness of this attempt to remove her from the darkness." This pitilessness suggests therapy hasn't worked, but Feigel wishes he faced his cruelty with more audacity. The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani, translated by Geoffrey Brock, is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99).
