Paperback of the week: The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani

Towards the end of The Anniversary, which I approached with a mixture of regret and relief, the unnamed narrator thanks a therapist for explaining to him that “one way to express violence was through destruction, but that another way, more important and in her eyes more honest, was through precision.” By this measure, Andrea Bajani’s 10th novel – winner of Italy’s Strega prize – is a ferocious work of literature.

The anniversary of the title marks a decade since the narrator stopped talking to his parents. He was 40 when he made this decision, saying goodbye at the end of his regular weekly visit from Turin to their small city on the way to the Alps, knowing he would not see or even speak to them again. They have been, he writes, “the best 10 years of my life”.

This radical step is taken to escape a violent, controlling father and a mother entirely in his thrall. A man who hurls his daughter’s birthday cake to the floor, tries to hack his children’s canoe to pieces, throws his elderly mother out of his house, and breaks his wrist by punching the fridge. His aggression spills outside the family unit, too. Having been introduced to the narrator’s fiancee he tells her, “‘You’re taking my son away from me.’” When one of his wife’s handful of friends dies of cancer he claims responsibility, telling his son he has a “special weapon” that inflicts illness on those “who had been, as he saw it, wicked”.

At first the novel, translated by Geoffrey Brock, seems to have compassion for the narrator’s mother: a meek victim, a “shadow zone” of a person. But it proceeds to go somewhere more extreme, a place without pity. Yes, the father is a bully, architect of a patriarchy “closer to totalitarianism”. But the narrator points out that the mother isn’t afraid of her husband. For all its imperfections, their relationship, at the heart of this “ill-fated family”, is symbiotic. And when the narrator remembers his father hitting him, or shoving him against the wall, “my mother is missing. Or rather, in each scene, my mother looks away.” Understandably or not, she is complicit, which leaves her son no choice: to leave one, he must leave both.

The telephone is the book’s central symbol. It’s the 1990s before the father permits a landline in the house. Rather than an escape hatch, it limits the mother’s freedom because she could talk freely on a payphone, whereas now every conversation is monitored by her husband. He often takes the phone off the hook, marking his displeasure with its use. To avoid running up phone bills, the family develops a technique of signalling their availability by calling people and hanging up after a single ring. This workaround – a form of prisoners’ ingenuity – receives the father’s tacit approval.

The narrator briefly acknowledges good times – “pizza outings… hikes in the mountain with my father… the sight of him dancing alone in front of the stereo, sure that no one was watching… the way my mother said my name; the easy ordinariness of sitting with her in the kitchen, talking aimlessly about nothing in particular” – but they have mostly been removed. 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.

Very occasionally a sentence fails to land. Being harangued by his father, who has called him on his mobile phone, the narrator “screamed back, finally saying everything – what things? was there really anything to say?” That seeming avoidance of detail is at odds with the 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.

The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani, translated by Geoffrey Brock is published by Penguin International Writers (£12.99). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £11.69 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy