The Anniversary
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 2 jul 2026
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- USD 12.99
-
- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
'A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other' Jhumpa Lahiri
'Intense, sharply imagined and fascinating' Colm Toibin
'On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I’ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I’ve erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.'
A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others’ lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?
At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The narrator of this poignant Strega Prize–winning novel from Bajani (The Book of Homes) traces the causes and effects of his father's physical and emotional abuse on his family. It opens with the unnamed narrator recounting his last visit to his parents in a Turin suburb, when he was 41. Remarking on the "impregnable wall" he built after breaking off contact with his parents following that visit, he confesses that the time since then has been "the best ten years of my life." From there, he reveals how his mother became passive and indifferent, describing the "faint limp" she has from a childhood case of polio and the years of control by his father, who exiled the family from Rome to the small suburb, leaving her isolated. The father, who occasionally beat his wife and two children, mounted psychological tyrannies such as limiting their phone calls. Gradually, the narrator reveals that his paternal grandmother's descent from upper middle to lower class contributed to his father's frustration and anger. Through therapy, begun after the estrangement, the narrator begins to untangle his place in the family saga, and he eventually feels liberated. Bajani writes masterfully of the confusion that marked the narrator's early life, as well as the sadness that comes with the truth. The result is cathartic.
