A The son leaves home for university and visits his parents every fortnight for 20 years, dreading every encounter because of his father’s oppressive control and his mother’s self-effacing passivity. Then one day, he changes his phone number and stops all contact. Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary is written from the perspective of this son, 10 years after the breakup. He says that the middle decade has been the happiest time of his life.
The Anniversary has won Italy’s top literary prize and has sold hundreds of thousands. It has been praised for breaking taboos, showing families as unbreakable structures and sons capable of defying their parents – even in Italy, where the Godfather-like idea of the absolute nature of familial loyalty still permeates political and civic life. I came to it expecting some esoteric revelation to be found in Knausgaard or Houellebecq. What I found was something much simpler and quieter, highlighting truths I thought we already knew: fathers can be oppressive and patriarchal; Mothers may feel blocked and powerless; Children may be harmed, and physicians can help. Apart from the therapy, it was all material I recognized from the neorealist Italian fiction of a much earlier era. Natalia Ginzburg, for example, clearly shows how authoritarianism seeped into the family through patriarchal fathers, and mothers became hollow and timid in their wake.
Bajani’s previous novels have been larger in scale and more ambitious. The Book of Homes covers decades and cities in a series of architectural-cum-psychological portraits of “houses” (including cars and offices) inhabited by a character named “I”, but written with disorientation in the third person – as in “I am lying on the floor”. Every Promise takes on the legacy of Catholicism and fascism with a narrator whose marriage falls apart at the same time as he wrestles with his family’s military past. Anniversary has some of the experimental pace of these books, what the narrator calls “the thinking machine of the novel”. It is set up almost as a memoir, but the narrator says it needs a novel that he writes, because his mother has wrecked herself so much that she must be saved by invention. In interviews Bajani has said that he sees it as a political act; Giving voice to a silent victim of patriarchy.
And so the novel is structured as a fragmented series of memories of the narrator’s mother, interspersed with precise, often intense analysis and speculation. He was mesmerized by the way she managed to appear invisible even in the kitchen, which was her domain; and by the memories of being alive for a while with the few friends she managed to make, before her father separated her from even this companionship. In the hands of the narrator, the novel becomes a medium of retrospective exploration. Now she seems to realize that during those rare moments when her father’s violence became physical, her mother suddenly became more powerful, as she was finally “fully present in his life”.
It’s hard to bring a personality depicted like this to life on the page, but the effort is impressive. The narrator’s interest in her mother seems genuine and the enterprise of giving space in the book to this woman, whom she could not claim as her own, is generous and original. However, that didn’t stop the book from being tiresomely guesswork for me, and I think the problem may have been the reliance on therapy. The narrator meets an eccentric, semi-maternal therapist, who takes over the book like she takes over his life – available on the phone any time of the day or night he wants to call.
Clinically depicted, his entire childhood becomes a story of abuse, and the narrator must recognize that his impulse to keep the peace between his parents (“to give myself (to my father) to stop the explosion”) was the impulse of an abused child. Seen this way, the parents become overly scheming and over-the-top to maintain the narrative’s interest, and the reader becomes dependent on the narrator himself to do so. But, contrary to every promise, little is seen of his present life, and due to the medical framing, his past life is overdetermined.
What we do know about the protagonist is that he is obsessed with parents he doesn’t see – in fact, he is so obsessed with writing this book. I wondered whether Bajani intended to set her up as a somewhat unreliable narrator, whose belief in complete alienation with her parents is belied by her attraction to 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 ruthlessness of this effort to bring her out of the darkness, in the cruel task of bringing her into the light”. Perhaps it is in this misery that the narrator reveals that the therapy has not worked after all. I wished he would have faced his cruelty and constant conflict with more courage.
