Can a mother be abandoned? Andrea Bajani (Rome, 50 years) says yes. That any day you can get out of the family home and decide never again. And that you can continue to live without feeling guilt, because just as divorce exists, friendships are broken or a employment relationship is over, we should also be free to abandon our parents. The question is scandalous and heartbreaking, a taboo in the conservative Italy of Giorgia Meloni, defender of the traditional family. But this has not prevented the writer from being made with the Strega award, the most important award of transalpine literature, with The anniversary (Edited in Spanish by Anagrama, with Translation by Carlos Gumpert, and in Catalan with Periscopi, Anna Casassas Figueras).
Bajani has been touring the book for more than half a year. It is a promotional marathon that leaves him without energy, so much that he has developed the habit of naping every day. But he also allowed him to return to Italy after five years living in the United States, and checking firsthand how his work had become the summer book. “At first I thought, poor people, they don’t know what they are getting on. It is not exactly what one would think that it is a beach book,” Ironize during his passage this week in Madrid. But the numbers take the opposite. In eight months, The anniversary He sold more than 110,000 copies. “Obviously, there are many people who consider the summer as the occasion to do what they do not have time: dig into themselves, to think.”
Reflect, for example, about whether it is correct to remain within a family controlled by a possessive father, just because it is what society imposes. A father who condemns the mother to a life of physical and emotional abuses, and the children to live terrified by this dynamic that they recognize as violent, but of which they do not know how to escape. Until a Sunday, the protagonist of the book, an unnamed narrator, decides that he has the right to get away and says goodbye to his parents for the last time. He changes the phone number, he will live on the other side of the Atlantic and lets spend ten years (the anniversary to which the title refers) before starting to reflect on the motivations that led him to leave his family.
Family dynamics
It is not the first time that Bajani explores the complicated family dynamics. He did it at the beginning of his literary career, with two unpublished novels in Spanish (If you consider the faults y Every promise), which consolidated him as one of the most influential voices of contemporary Italian literature. If you consider the faults (which can be translated by “if you consider the fault”), is the story of a mother who leaves her son when she is just a child, but did not cause so much stir and the book she has just published. “It seems paradoxical to me to consider more acceptable for a mother to abandon a child unable to fend for himself, not that a 41 -year -old son abandons his parents. But it is because this is the taboo. We have the idea that we owe them all because they gave us life,” he reflects.
The problem, he explains, is that The anniversary It is, first of all, a political act. When he accepted the Strega award, he defended the role of literature to “answer the official version”, which in Italy remains “a patriarchal vision.” “Beyond the copies sold, what I felt was a sense of literary responsibility and militancy. The book he wins becomes the most read of the season. So as a writer you have the possibility of arouseing an interest and drawing attention to a problem,” he explains.
The similarities between the life of Bajani and its anonymous protagonist have raised many speculations about how much of what appears in these pages belongs to fiction. The two were born in Rome and moved in childhood to the province of northern Italy, in a migration process otherwise that moved them away from the vibrant life of the capital to end in a town where nothing happened. Already of adults, they lived in Turin, Paris and the United States, among many other places.
That pilgrimage around the world found space in his previous novel, THE BOOK OF THE HOUSES (Anagrama), which tells the story of a man through the homes he lived in. There are real and metaphorical houses, which were inhabited by Bajani only mentally. Others serve the author to rebuild the history of Italy, such as the Zulo where Aldo Moro was kidnapped, or the poet’s house, where he introduces Pier Paolo Pasolini.
But as much as criticism tries, I discard it, it rules out to recognize itself in the protagonist of The anniversary Beyond the places where he lived, and insists on the need to receive the book as a novel: “For me the interesting thing is that it is perceived as a collective story. If it is reduced to an autobiography, we would be making the enormous political error of not recognizing that the patriarchy affects millions of families.”
And that the problem is universal, check it every day with its students from the Rice University (Houston, Texas), where he is a creative writing professor. “The United States is a country where there is a lot of extended violence. War is very present, and although it occurs geographically far from the country, then the country of veterans fills. The survivors return home, but do not fit. My students tell me many painful stories, of people who fail to leave the physical and mental maze where they have gotten into,” he explains.
From one of these conversations, he was born The anniversarywhich began as a poetry that wrote a night that could not sleep, and that became a novel in the next three years. “I owe a lot to poetry, it is a constant in my life,” acknowledges the writer, who in more than 20 years of career also published three poems. Every night, before sleeping, read some verses as if they were small melatonin pills that help you fall asleep. “And when I travel, I always carry a book of poems in the suitcase.” This time a Louise Glück anthology was brought to remember that although the world has become a ruthless place, “literature has the power to answer the official version.”