The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani review – meet the wearily predictable parents | Fiction

A son leaves home for university and goes on to pay fortnightly visits to his parents for 20 years, dreading every encounter because of the oppressive control exerted by his father and the self-effacing passivity of his mother. Then one day, he changes his phone number and cuts off all contact. Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary is written from the perspective of this son, 10 years after the rupture. The intervening decade has been, he says, the happiest period of his life.

The Anniversary has won Italy’s top literary prize and sold in the hundreds of thousands. It’s been lauded for shattering taboos, revealing families to be breakable structures and sons capable of defying their parents – even in Italy, where a Godfather-like idea of the absolute nature of family loyalty still pervades political and civic life. I came to it expecting some of the lurid revelation found in Knausgård or Houellebecq. What I found was something much simpler and quieter, exposing truths I thought we already knew: fathers can be oppressive and patriarchal; mothers can be occluded and powerless; children can be damaged, and therapists can help. Therapy aside, this was all material I recognised from neorealist Italian fiction of a much earlier era. Natalia Ginzburg, for example, showed vividly how totalitarianism seeped into the family through its patriarchal fathers, with mothers becoming hollow and timid in their wake.

Bajani’s previous novels have been larger-scale and more overtly ambitious. The Book of Homes ranged across decades and cities in a series of architectural-cum-psychological portraits of “homes” (including cars and offices) inhabited by a character known as “I” but written disorientingly in the third person – as in “I lies on the floor”. Every Promise took on the legacy of Catholicism and fascism with a narrator whose marriage implodes at the same time as he wrestles with his family’s military past. The Anniversary has some of the experimental momentum of these books in its commitment to what the narrator terms the “thinking machine of the novel”. It’s set up almost as a memoir, but the narrator says that it needs to be a novel that he writes, because his mother has effaced herself so much that she needs to be rescued by invention. In interviews, Bajani has said that he sees this as a political act; giving a voice to a silenced victim of the patriarchy.

And so the novel is structured as a fragmentary series of memories of the narrator’s mother, accompanied by precise, often acute analysis and speculation. He’s fascinated by the way she managed to seem invisible even in the kitchen that was her domain; and by memories of her being briefly animated with the few friends she managed to make, before his father cut her off even from this companionship. In the narrator’s hands, the novel becomes a vehicle for retrospective discovery. It seems to be only now that he realises that during the rare moments when his father’s violence became physical, his mother suddenly became the more powerful one, because she was at last “fully present in her own life”.

It’s hard to bring alive a personality this denuded on the page, but the attempt is impressive. The narrator’s interest in his mother feels genuine and the enterprise of giving this woman space in the book that she didn’t manage to claim in their home is generous and original. This didn’t stop the book from feeling wearily predictable to me, though, and I think the problem may be the reliance on therapy. The narrator finds an eccentric, quasi-maternal therapist, who takes over the book as she takes over his life – available on the phone at any time of day or night he wants to call.

Framed therapeutically, his whole childhood becomes a story of abuse, and the narrator has to recognise that his impulse to keep the peace between his parents (“surrendering myself to [my father] in order to prevent detonations”) was the impulse of an abused child. Seen like this, the parents become too schematic and too extreme to sustain the narrative interest, and the reader is reliant on the narrator himself to do this. But, unlike in Every Promise, very little is seen of his current life, and because of the therapeutic framing, his past life is overdetermined.

What we do know about the protagonist is that he has remained obsessed by the parents he doesn’t see – obsessed enough, indeed, to write this book. I wondered if Bajani meant to set him up as a somewhat unreliable narrator, whose confidence in his absolute rupture with his parents is belied by his fascination with them. Certainly the narrator himself is aware of the cruelty as well as the generosity of his mission. “If there is filial piety in me,” he writes early on, “it is in the pitilessness of this attempt to remove her from the darkness, the cruel act of bringing her into the light”. Perhaps in this very pitilessness the narrator reveals that the therapy hasn’t worked after all. I’d have liked him to face his own cruelty and continued ambivalence with more audacity.