The often-untenable bonds of family take center stage in The Anniversary, an eloquently rendered, heart-wrenching short novel written by prize-winning Italian author Andrea Bajani (translated by Geoffrey Brock).
The unnamed, Northern Italian-based narrator tells the reader, “I’ve never written about my mother, nor ever given her much thought, it’s because in order to do so she would need to be separated from my father. Which involves a delicate operation, a surgical disposition, a steady hand. It requires patience and precision, a grammatical scalpel.” Introspection and the persistence of memory form an adult son’s search to understand his parents. Their patriarchally-dominated marriage--choices made for their lives, along with the narrator’s own choices--form an estranged family dynamic.
Through beautifully curated, concise flashback scenes, the narrator probes the story of his parents’ lives before they were married and the smothering challenges experienced over the course of their unfulfilling union. The narrator exposes foibles: the father an abusive, insecure, iron-fisted ogre; the mother sadly submissive—a woman whose chance for a life of her own is wrenched due to the vows of commitment imposed by marriage. While the narrator tells his family's story through the prism of his "liberating" ten-year estrangement--one that was entirely unplanned--readers may question the sincerity of his deliverance: do we, can we, ever really escape the bonds of family?
With articulate wisdom, Bajani’s speaker passionately probes--and grapples with--hard truths, showing how time can’t change the past, but how retreat is sometimes the only path to survival.
The Anniversary by
Andrea Bajani (translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock)
Other
Press,
$16.99 Paperback Original, 9781635426182, 144 pages
Publishing Date: August 25, 2026
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