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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



The Anniversary

by
Andrea Bajani


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The Anniversary


Title: The Anniversary
Author: Andrea Bajani
Genre: Novel
Written: 2025 (Eng. 2026)
Length: 135 pages
Original in: Italian
Availability: The Anniversary - US
The Anniversary - UK
The Anniversary - Canada
L'anniversaire - France
Der Jahrestag - Deutschland
L'anniversario - Italia
El aniversario - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : powerful small family-study

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Financial Times . 2/7/2026 John Self
The Guardian . 13/7/2026 Lara Feigel
il manifesto . 2/3/2025 Luca Illetterati
The Observer . 11/7/2026 Chris Power
The Spectator . 4/7/2026 Robert Potts
TLS . 12/6/2026 Costica Bradatan


  From the Reviews:
  • "Bajani carefully calibrates the tensions in the story, a balancing act that Geoffrey Brock skilfully retains in his English translation. (...) All this provides plenty to chew on, though occasionally Bajani's prose can be more glutinous than nutritious. He has an insatiable appetite for the overblown metaphor (.....) The novel works best when Bajani speaks plainly of the torturous family dynamics." - John Self, Financial Times

  • "I came to it expecting some of the lurid revelation found in Knausgård or Houellebecq. What I found was something much simpler and quieter, exposing truths I thought we already knew (.....) It’s hard to bring alive a personality this denuded on the page, but the attempt is impressive." - Lara Feigel, The Guardian

  • "La parola romanzo è forse una delle parole chiave del libro di Bajani: vi compare ben quattordici volte. (...) (I)l romanzo di Bajani incarna una dimensione etica: che sta nella sua scrittura, nella sua capacità di tendere con precisione e delicatezza, senza mai scivolare in formulazioni retoriche e senza mai cedere a tentazioni comunicative, al vero che è in gioco." - Luca Illetterati, il manifesto

  • "Daily life, he argues, serves to minimise the darkness. Only through a relentless process of isolating and cataloguing this abuse, and by then putting his experience into the “machine for thinking” that he calls the novel, can the true gravity of the crime be judged. (...) (T)he otherwise forensic quality of the writing, which feels intensely personal -- almost obscenely intimate -- but glimmers with moments of recognition. They are mostly unwelcome, but that only makes this searching, confrontational book more vital." - Chris Power, The Observer

  • "It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. (...) (T)he triumph of this short, sometimes heartbreaking book is its patient attention to human psychology; and its narrator’s attempt at fair accounting is a constant riposte to the totalitarian monomania of his father. (...) Lethally judicious, The Anniversary lingers in the mind long after you close it." - Robert Potts, The Spectator

  • "Bajani's prose is sharp and brims with psychological insights (...). Perhaps its most salient feature -- in deft translation by Geoffrey Brock -- is its skill at depicting alienation." - Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The narrator of The Anniversary opens his account describing the last time he saw parents, some ten years earlier, when he was forty-one, after decades of regularly visiting them -- every two weeks or so -- since he first left home ("under the traditional pretext of college"). That day, a decade earlier, however, without apparent warning -- though mom seems to have sensed something -- he makes a decisive break. Indeed:

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.
       The Anniversary then describes the family and its dynamics, especially between father and mother, and what the narrator fled. There is the domineering father "who subsumed everything into the story of himself", occasionally even violent, and there is the mother, living completely under his thumb. While growing up, the children are at best supporting players for much of this: the son who tries to defuse any tension that arises; the daughter -- the narrator's older sister -- who separates herself from the family as soon as she can (and is disappointed in her brother for not standing up against their father with her).
       Much of the focus early on is on the mother, and how the father dominated, belittled, and controlled her; Bajani is very good in these examples and details. The father is a reader, for example -- but:
     'This is a book for your mother' was my father's way of declaring that a novel wasn't any good. The phrase did contain a kind of affection, the perverse, frank, aggressive kind that follows, or underlines, an assertion of control. To admit such a book to our home library, which as an eager autodidact he had gradually built over the years, was a concession he made to her. But labelling a book as 'for your mother' meant, above all, that its proper place would be in the bin.
       Small escapes from the overbearing domestic scene -- the mother briefly holds a job; for a time she has a close friend -- only make the father's controlling hold all the more manifest. Only bits of insight into his character, beyond how he presents himself, are occasionally dripped in -- his own upbringing, his professional failure that also led to reïnvention (that included the physical move of the family, whereby: "Ours was an anomalous movement, from capital to periphery, centre to margin, not the other way around. From Rome to the pedestrian foothills of Piedmont, with its mix of the rural and the industrial"). There are bursts of violence, and one stands out: "For many years, I built a kind of pat narrative around that night: that of a family organism rooted in violence wrought by hands". The sudden break of the narrator with is parent then doesn't come out of nowhere but is still striking in its abruptness, after the slow build-up over so many years.
       Just how much it all has weighed on him is suggested by how, when he turns to help and starts seeing a therapist: "We had begun with four or five sessions a week, which I felt I needed". For all that, the narrator remains something of a cipher, and we only learn bits of how this past decade -- "the best ten years of my life", he had proclaimed early on -- has gone for him. They include marriage and divorce, and while he now lives with a woman with whom he has a child he barely describes her (or their relationship) beyond, for example, referring to her as: "The mother of my son".
       This account -- "looking back on all this now, through the thinking machine of the novel" -- is a compelling exercise, but even as it is so penetrating in parts, showing and digging into wounds that are not so much raw as long-festering, so much remains unspoken. The narrator takes a hard look at his parents' relationship and their characters', but avoids peering much elsewhere or considering or revealing much more that was involved -- including about himself (with the sister, in particular, little more than a shadowy presence).
       It's still a strong piece of work, a fascinating family-study that gets to the heart of the matter -- the father-figure, and his control over the mother, as well as how the son has (and continues to) try to deal with those family dynamics, both in the moment and now in retrospect -- exceptionally well.

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 June 2026

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Links:

The Anniversary: Reviews: Other books by Andrea Bajani under review: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Italian author Andrea Bajani was born in 1975.

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© 2026 the complete review

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