#RivetingReviews: Sonja van der Westhuizen reviews THE ANNIVERSARY by Andrea Bajani, translated by Geoffrey Brock

Since his 2005 debut, Cordiali saluti (‘Yours Sincerely’), Andrea Bajani has won some of Italy’s most acclaimed literary prizes. Although his work spans various genres, complex family dynamics remain at its core. The Anniversary only strengthens this focus. 

Anniversaries usually call for celebration, but the fifty-one-year-old narrator of Bajani’s novel is marking something far more unusual: a decade since cutting all ties with his parents. As the novel opens, the unnamed narrator relives the last time he visited them, and over the following mere 137 pages, he reflects on his upbringing and the circumstances leading to his decisive choice, which included changing phone numbers, residences and eventually continents. What emerges from his memories is a family trapped in fragile state of tension, ruled by a tyrannical father. 

Through intimidation, psychological manipulation, and self-pity, he uses fear to control his household. Within this environment, the narrator’s mother exists purely in relation to her husband, her place in the world ‘seems too insignificant to merit an audience’. While every detail of the father’s life is documented and remembered, the mother remains a shadowy figure on the periphery. 

Ensnared in a loveless marriage by traditional Catholic values, financial dependence and a patriarchal culture, her husband sees his wife’s brief attempts at independence – working as a cashier or making friends – as personal attacks. As an intelligent woman, any small taste of freedom threatens to open a door for her, might show her what life could be without him.

Despite his best attempts, however, the narrator remains emotionally bound to his parents. He may claim that the ten years without them were the best years of his life, yet there are indications of a different truth. Looking back, he is filled with regret and guilt for supporting his father and neglecting his mother. At the same time, he struggles to understand her passive acceptance of her husband’s abuse and affairs: 

‘I believed in his version, so it never occurred to me that there was anything worth saying about her.’

The narrator’s actions challenge the deep-rooted Italian belief that family always comes first and parents must never be defied. His story reflects a broader patriarchal system in which fathers held total authority, mothers were powerless, and children were left with the psychological scars. It was ‘an endless, mechanical reenactment of the same roles. The executioner, the victim, the cowardly son trying to mediate’. 

Bajani’s style is bare boned with little direct dialogue. Instead, events unfold entirely through the narrator’s perspective. While one might expect a deeply emotional account of a traumatic childhood, the prose remains deliberate, detached, and uncannily calm. 

Though his approach differs from Karl Ove Knausgaard, their thematic focus aligns. Both grew up under the shadow of a domineering father, suffered emotional abuse and a challenging home environment. For both, the act of writing becomes a form of therapy, an attempt to analyse, dissect, and process the past. 

Bajani’s sparse prose suits the emotional distance his protagonist requires if he is to confront painful memories and perfectly captures the perpetual tension of his upbringing. The Anniversary illustrates the lasting and damaging impact of a traumatic childhood within a rigid patriarchal system. 

Reviewed by Sonja van der Westhuizen

THE ANNIVERSARY

Written by Andrea Bajani

Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

Published by Penguin Classics (2026)

September 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Sonja van der Westhuizen is a book critic, proofreader and graphic designer for publishers and independent authors. She writes reviews and features for the Crime Fiction Lover website as well as several South African newspapers and magazines, and she has served on the Ngaio Marsh Awards judging panel since 2021. She enjoys a wide range of translated fiction, including crime, literary, and occasionally horror. Her websites are: https://sonjavanderwesthuizen.wordpress.com/ and https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/.

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