The Anniversary, Andrea Bajani's prize-winning novel, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Italy and been lauded for shattering taboos about family loyalty. Yet for this reviewer, the book feels wearyingly predictable, relying too heavily on therapy to frame a childhood of abuse.
Plot and premise
The story follows a son who leaves home for university and continues fortnightly visits to his parents for 20 years, dreading each encounter due to his father's oppressive control and his mother's passive self-effacement. One day, he changes his phone number and cuts off all contact. The novel is written from his perspective, a decade after the rupture, which he describes as the happiest period of his life.
Awards and reception
The Anniversary won Italy's top literary prize and has been celebrated for revealing families as breakable structures and sons capable of defying parents, even in a culture where absolute family loyalty often pervades political and civic life. However, the reviewer found the material familiar, echoing themes from neorealist Italian fiction like Natalia Ginzburg's works, which showed how totalitarianism seeped into families through patriarchal fathers.
Narrative style and structure
Bajani's previous novels, such as The Book of Homes and Every Promise, were more ambitiously experimental. The Anniversary is set up as a memoir but the narrator insists it must be a novel because his mother has effaced herself so much that she needs to be rescued by invention. Bajani has called this a political act, giving voice to a silenced victim of the patriarchy. The novel is structured as fragmentary memories of the narrator's mother, accompanied by acute analysis and speculation.
Therapeutic framing
The narrator finds an eccentric, quasi-maternal therapist who becomes available at any hour. Framed therapeutically, his childhood becomes a story of abuse, and he must recognize his impulse to keep the peace as that of an abused child. The reviewer argues this makes the parents too schematic and extreme, and the reader relies solely on the narrator, whose current life is barely shown. The past life becomes overdetermined.
Unreliable narrator?
The protagonist remains obsessed with the parents he doesn't see, enough to write the book. The reviewer wonders if Bajani meant him as unreliable, his confidence in the rupture 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, the cruel act of bringing her into the light.” The reviewer suggests this pitilessness reveals therapy hasn't worked, and wishes the narrator faced his cruelty and ambivalence more audaciously.
