‘The Anniversary’: This Italian novel examines a patriarchal nuclear family and its links to fascism

Andrea Bajani’s novel, the winner of the 2025 Strega Prize, is a radical exploration of the psychology of family estrangement. It appears at a cultural moment where therapy-oriented language such as “gaslighting”, “boundaries”, and “toxic” has percolated into the most intimate realms of daily life and adult children are fearlessly breaking taboos and going no-contact with their parents by denouncing the abuse within highly dysfunctional households. The Anniversary examines the social institution of the patriarchal nuclear family and its links to fascism in Italy, showing how domestic violence and coercive control by male members of the family are rendered invisible and normative.

The totalitarian infrastructures

In the novel, following a series of “unreliable memories”, the narrator recalls events that led to the final goodbye with his parents ten years ago. With the dysfunctional family at its centre, The Anniversary is an intensely psychological novel. Yet it does not treat the trauma of upbringing as a problem that can be solved through psychoanalysis. Instead, it moves outward to reflect on wider social conditions that allow totalitarian values to be reproduced in the private realms of the modern nuclear family.

Bajani poses unsettling questions:

“Can one abandon one’s own parents? Or rather, can one retreat from them, simply removing one’s body from the...

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