He tells a family drama along an entire life Andrea Bajani. He does it The anniversaryhis latest narrative effort published by Feltrinelli, who entered the finalist of the Strega 2025 prize with the greatest number of preferences. The title of the novel refers to the ten years spent from the last meeting of the protagonist, first -person narrator of the story, with his parents. Ten years from that moment when the front door closed for the last time – it would be better to say out of the way – of their home, to stand a definitive wall, move away and not return.

The removal of the protagonist was born from the refusal of a very heavy patriarchal inheritance, of which, in one way or another, he felt complicit over the years. It is a clear detachment from a family ‘guided’ by a master and husband master, representation of that man figure belonging to a male -sighted subculture that already at the end of the seventies – that is, when the family unit at the center of the narrative was formed – began to be anachronistic.

And then there is the father who mistreats his wife, who marks his times in everyday life. A enslaved wife who deals with the children, the house and the husband. A husband who forbids and imposes, prevents a social life from his consort, allows himself to have a affair extramarital. Because “he feels the need”, and this without changing the balance or scratching his position. Because it is the man who decides and woe to contradict. The now adult son understands that to find his own inner tranquility he must cut the umbilical cord that keeps him bound to that patriarchal microcosm. And so it does: Change phone number, change the city.

Ten years later, through the pages of the novel – who knows if they also have saving power – the protagonist feels the need to partially return to their steps, giving value to that mother who has always lived in the shade of her husband, submissive, obedient in all respects. He tries to highlight it, to detach it from a ‘physical’ reality in which he almost struggles to remember it, giving it a three -dimensional dimension between the pages. He tries to see a tip of positivity in the maternal figure, who has always lived in resignation, consciously, and without ever having the desire to have, from life, something better for himself (and for children).

The anniversary It is a novel that speaks of pain. That of a wife and mother, that of the children, but also that of the Father ‘tyrant’. Yet Bajani remains – this is what, personally, it seemed to me – cold and set. It seems more attentive to the way it gives shape to the content than to the content itself. In describing emotions, and the events that translate into emotions, use too ‘combed’ writing, almost robotic; Ciseel the page carefully and seems to want to contain everything inside the edges of the page, rather than to make the bomb exploded. The emotions are there, it is clear, but they are hidden under a thick curtain and emerge with difficulty when the narrator decides is the case to make them emerge on the surface.

Bajani writes about tears and screams, but conflict and discomfort are treated with too much detachment. And the risk, perhaps, is that his novel is received as an exercise in style. Of course, it is pleased.