Andrea Bajani: "In 'The Anniversary' I wanted to break the taboo of family, which is untouchable."

The Italian novelist Andrea Bajani says that when he writes he likes to question all certainties , something that in his latest title, The Anniversary , Strega Prize 2025 , is evident from the first pages when he "breaks" the cultural and political taboo of the family institution, something "untouchable."

Published by Anagrama, in this story the reader will delve into the adventures of a man in his forties, who decides to leave his family forever , after hating the violence of a dominant father and a silent and submissive mother.

In a meeting with journalists, Bajani, who lives nine months a year in the United States, where he teaches at a university in Houston, explained that his new work arose precisely from lessons on how to write about family, with students who often come to the classroom with "stories of great pain and violence, rarely happy ones."

"When I listen to them and see how they share their stories with each other, I'm amazed. They're like minotaurs trapped in a labyrinth , like monsters condemned to never get out. In the fall of 2021, after listening to them a lot, I thought about making something, a target, to help people escape the labyrinth," he said.

The author believes he has put together a literary artifact that , although told in the first person, is "a collective story," which has led to readers approaching him at numerous presentations in Italy to ask him how he knew what had happened to his family for years.

"In this society," he reflected, "there is the possibility of breaking any bond . You can break it at work, in friendship, you can get divorced and the law will protect you, but it is impossible to break a family from within for reasons of blood."

Bajani clarified that his protagonist says "enough" to the patriarchal legacy , although "he doesn't take the side of virtue; he's like a beginner who has to invent everything."

Through literature, she has been able to delve into all of this, "see the movements within this system, see what's happening with the patriarchal organization of the family, question it, although I don't reject it either," she said.

The work, which has been like a "tornado" in Italy , in the words of its author, arrives in bookstores at a time when "there is a political and historical movement throughout the world that is leading to reactionary tendencies."

In his opinion, capitalism, the most conservative part of society, what it does is "advertise, propagandize, sell that what was before worked, but the solution to the political, social and economic disaster is not to offer the simplified, binary version , saying that everything was better before."

In this story, however, with a man who looks back to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Bajani seeks to ask: "This doesn't work now, but did it work before?"

With the novel being translated into different languages , the author eagerly awaits how it will be received in countries like the Nordic countries, where Protestantism is prevalent, with a family style different from that of Mediterranean countries. "Perhaps they enjoy reading the story more than the questions I pose," he concluded.