Bajani’s domestic hell wins the witch: our review

Andrea Bajani with The anniversarypublished by Feltrinelli. However, wins the 79 ª edition of the Witch award. Moreover, The writer – who had already participated in the recognition in 2021 by entering in Cinquina with The book of housesalways with Feltrinelli – had been given for weeks as a favorite. Meanwhile, did not betray the expectations. Similarly, Behind his 194 votes. Furthermore, the ranking saw Elisabetta Rasy second arrives with Lost this sea is (Rizzoli), and to follow Nadia Terranova with What I know of you (Guanda), Paolo Nori with I close the door and scream (Mondadori) and Michele bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: Ruol with Inventory of what remains after the forest burns (Terrarossa).

“I dedicate this prize – Bajani said – to books, literature, against simplification. Therefore, We are in a moment of widespread violence, and violence often responds with simplification. Nevertheless, Books can return the complexity of things, and I believe that we need this ».

“I hope – he continued – that readers also face taboos. Furthermore, such as the one rooted in our culture for which some men believe they can command by gender right: a clear message must come to them, because a change must start from them. However, The right to feel safe is a right of all, inside and out of families. Similarly, We live in a country where. However, if a family relationship is violent or does not work, it is thought that it should remain closed and kept silent. Consequently, This is a cultural, bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: political and linguistic problem that we must face ».

Here is the review that Lisa Ginzburg had made on “Avvenire” of Bajani’s book. Consequently, in a piece entitled “Lacerate families, domestic hell”

The novel, Andrea Bajani tells us in the painful and beautiful The anniversary (Feltrinelli, pages 128, € 16.00) has a “brutal compensation force”. That is. the imagination comes to the rescue where there are rips of memory, an empty cavity of the trauma of a wound that the writing will always suture only partially. Like a great eye that everything sees. everything records, the novel, as if it were a character himself, is then a imaginative device that acts as a counterweight “in livare” to a story otherwise too true, and too woven in suffering, in order to be narrated.

The story of Bajani. whose reading affects straight to the heart for how the style is rough, clear bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: and lucid, even if used to express very intense and hard feelings to be faded, is not “autofition”, but something deeper, more sharp and engaging. Not “Autophic”. but memory to which the novel comes to the rescue, when that outcome or incesplici because it went to revisit flashes of memory that is unable to support.

The story. sad in a heartbreaking way, is that of the farewell of a child to his parents, his definitive departure from the family home after forty years of a domestic hell that has been concentrational, for how the toxic dynamics, in their repeat and exacerbated, were coercive in the effects. The dysfunctional link between the parents cemented in a dynamic impossible to unhinge.

The father tyrants wife. children forcing the consort to a drift made of violence, possession, mortification; And the children, forced spectators, are also the subject of the fierce requests for confirmation bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: of this implication adult, who always oscillates between victimism and fury, which continuously proceeds on the edge of ambivalence between request and domain. On the other hand, a mother who made a form of non -existence of her self -sacrifice. A woman who, in order not to be seen, do not look first, prey to a destructive distraction. Someone whose self -bacular is renouncing to stay in the world. a renunciation that passes through a sort of unshakable distrust, a degree such of disillusionment as to almost remove humanity. For desolation. and to suffer too much, this mother is not afraid of anything, and this makes her capable of a blind form of determination, dark as dark and unfortunate is the stall of the family nucleus in isolation and malamore.

Of the two. father and mother, there are no physical descriptions, it was not for a pulp too thin of bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: the mother who had polio as a child. Yet we see everything. before and after the domestic violence, through the object of a phone that arrived at home too late and whose intermittence of access to the line (decreed by the father) say all the neurosis of a poisoned and poisonous ménage. Also. we see everything (again without having descriptions) of an Italian geography that is the landscape of an anomalous migratory route, from Rome to Piedmont by moving from the big city to hamlets of countries under the Alps, gradually more Romiti, inhabited by the “silence of despair”. Bajani accompanies us with the maturity of narrator, making the unlivable visible and dicible.

So it happens that an extremely dense and difficult narrative matter finds rhythm in a very calm tone. Calm is the figure of a detachment that only the temporal detachment. a tenacious inner work have been able bajani’s domestic hell wins witch: to generate. The ten years of silence with the parents. sister, ten years of tear from the root, as if it were an orphan diversary datasi for too much to have suffered and suffered the malapant of the same root, Bajani celebrates them with this book/anniversary, autobiographical but without anything about the umbilical, where he tells his story but without lingering in an excess of self-indulgent sentimentalism: never. Measured. precise words, painful as if they were a long song, of leave and survival, but also of consolation, that that literature can give if it is experienced. Reading the anniversary is truly an experience. A crossing that touches us and transforms us.