Anniversary Review by Andrea Pagani – Meet Parents Who Are Exhaustingly Predictable | imaginary

A The son leaves home for college and visits his parents every two weeks for 20 years, dreading every encounter because of his father’s oppressive control and his mother’s humble passivity. Then one day, he changed his phone number and cut off all communications. “Remembrance” by Andrea Pagani is written from the perspective of this son, after 10 years of estrangement. He says that the decade he went through was the happiest period of his life.

The Anniversary won Italy’s highest literary award and sold in the hundreds of thousands. It has been praised for breaking taboos, revealing that families are breakable structures, and that sons are capable of defying their fathers—even in Italy, where a Godfather-like idea of ​​the absolute nature of familial loyalty still pervades political and civic life. I came to him expecting some of the terrible revelations found in Knausgaard or Houellebecq. What I found was something simpler and calmer, revealing truths I thought we already knew: Parents can be oppressive and paternalistic; Mothers can be closed off and helpless. Children can be hurt, and therapists can help. Regardless of the treatment, this was all material I recognized from Italian neo-realist fiction of a much earlier era. For example, Natalia Ginzburg has clearly shown how totalitarianism seeped into the family through its patriarchal fathers, with mothers becoming hollow and ashamed in the aftermath.

Pagani’s previous novels were larger in scope and more overtly ambitious. The Houses writers ranged across decades and cities in a series of architectural and psychological images of “houses” (including cars and offices) inhabited by a figure known as “I” but confusingly written in the third person—as in “I’m lying on the floor.” Every Promise takes on the legacy of Catholicism and fascism with the narrator whose marriage is crumbling at the same time as he grapples with his family’s military past. “Anniversary” has some of the experimental momentum of these books in its commitment to what the narrator calls “the thinking machine of the novel.” It’s almost set up as a memoir, but the narrator says it must be a novel he’s writing, because his mother has erased herself so much that she needs to be saved by invention. Pagani said in interviews that he sees this as a political act. Giving voice to the silent victim of patriarchy.

The novel is thus structured as a fragmented series of recollections of the narrator’s mother, accompanied by careful and often acute analysis and speculation. He was impressed by the way she managed to seem invisible even in the kitchen that was her domain; And with memories of her being briefly lively with the few friends she managed to make, before his father cut her off even from that company. In the hands of the narrator, the novel becomes a means of retrospective discovery. It is only now that he seems to realize that during the rare moments when his father’s violence became physical, his mother suddenly became the stronger one, because she had finally become “fully present in her own life.”

It’s difficult to bring a character who has been stripped bare to life on this page, but the attempt is admirable. The narrator’s concern for his mother feels genuine, and the initiative to give this woman a space in the book that she could not claim in her home is generous and innovative. But that hasn’t stopped me from feeling predictably bored, and I think the problem may lie in the dependency on therapy. The narrator finds an eccentric, quasi-maternal therapist, who takes over the book while she takes over his life—available on the phone any time of the day or night he wants to call.

In a therapeutic setting, his entire childhood becomes a story of abuse, and the narrator must realize that his motive is to keep the peace between his parents (“I Turn Myself Into” [my father] “In order to prevent bombings”) was the motive of an abused child. Given this situation, the parents become too scheming and extreme to sustain narrative interest, and the reader relies on the narrator himself to do so. But, unlike Every Promise, very little of his present life is seen, and because of the therapeutic setting, his past life is overdetermined.

What we know about the novel’s protagonist is that he remained obsessed with his parents, whom he never saw—obsessed enough to write this book. I wondered if Pagani meant to present him as a somewhat unreliable narrator, whose confidence is belied by his absolute separation from his parents due to his infatuation with them. Certainly the narrator himself recognizes the cruelty and generosity of his mission. “If there is piety in me,” he wrote early on, “it is in the cruelty of this attempt to bring it out of the darkness, the cruel work of bringing it into the light.” Perhaps it is in this very cruelty that the narrator reveals that the treatment did not work at all. I wish he would face his constant cruelty and duplicity with more courage.