L’anniversario

Can you abandon your father and mother? Can one slam the door, storm down the stairs and decide never to see them again? Can one question one’s origins, escape their grip? After ten years spent escaping the wear and tear of subtle, pervasive violence within the walls of his own home, a son can finally turn around and recount the story of his wretched family and the taboo surrounding this silence ‘with the brutal force of the novel’. And thus mark a heart-wrenching anniversary: without accusing and without redeeming, in a ‘scandalously calm’ voice, as Emmanuel Carrère writes to emphasise its relentless power. The resulting narrative is a poignant and crystal-clear portrait of a woman on the brink of ruin, who has given up everything just to mean something in her husband’s eyes, whilst he keeps her and the children trapped within a system where possession and the demand for love are the strands of a single knot. The airtight isolation to which he confines them is occasionally shattered by the ringing of a much-resented telephone, by the occasional school friend, or by a friend of the mother’s who is soon banished. In this concentration-camp-like microcosm, an irrepressible desire for rebirth gradually takes root in the son – and in the readers –: to be oneself, to live one’s own life, to open up to others without the terror of reprisals. With the certainty that, to save oneself, nothing can be saved from there. L’anniversario is, first and foremost, a novel of liberation, which dismantles and unmasks the totalitarianism of the family. It wounds us with its honesty, disarms us with its candour, lays us bare with its truth. It is the slap we received at birth: thanks to that pain, we breathe. Ten years ago, on that day, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then, I’ve changed my phone number, my home, my continent; I’ve built an impregnable wall; I’ve put an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.