Andrea Bajani: "Dad is allowed to be violent just because he's a man."

BarcelonaAndrea Bajani (Rome, 1975), which with The birthday (Periscopio/Anagrama; Catalan translation by Anna Casassas) received the latest Strega Prize, is as meticulous as the narrator of his latest novel. Between interviews, he orders a short cappuccino with soy milk and doesn't crack a shy smile until after he's tried it. "I'm obsessive, like all writers," he admits. Author of some twenty books—including novels, poetry collections, and essays—in The birthday Bajani takes stock of his relationship with his parents starting on the tenth anniversary of losing contact with them. Rather than writing a volume of memoirs constructed from the intimate scenes that led him to make this decision, the author reveals his pain through a twisted and nuanced text, in which, through the portrait of a mother who disappears to please her husband, he draws out all the dysfunctions of a family and its family.

How would you say this novel connects with your previous ones? And how does it break away, if at all?

— Every book I write is a mystery, not only because of the story I'll end up telling, but also because of the form it will take. The novel is an uncodified genre in perpetual motion. Every time I write one, I become a novice again. I know that, at the end of the process, I'll be a different person. All my work is connected by that metamorphosis that each book entails. Thematically, The birthday It is related to three of my novels: on the one hand, with Map of an absence (2007; in Spanish in Siruela), which speaks of a mother who abandons her son in order to establish herself professionally; on the other hand, with A blessing to the world (Einaudi, 2016) and The Book of Houses (2021, in Catalan on Periscope), focusing on characters who have suffered violence at home during their childhood.

The violence present in The birthday It's primarily psychological. The father manipulates and abuses the mother and, in turn, the two children as well.

— Many men believe that psychological violence is more acceptable than physical violence. They are wrong: it is the same violence; it cannot be tolerated. Their father is allowed to be violent simply because he is a man, for political and cultural reasons. This father's power is unjustified.

The son, who tells us the story, admits that for years he was an accomplice to his father. Why?

— This story begins when a son rejects complicity with his father. This father's model has been easy for him to accept for years without questioning why it's what the system intends. There comes a time when their relationship begins to deteriorate, and he finally realizes that if he allied himself with his father, it was because he was afraid of him.

Mother and sister have it too, right?

— The birthday It is the story of a family that remained united through fear and complicity until, through a single gesture, it fragmented and shattered into pieces.

The gesture is that of a son who decides never to see his parents again.

— Mom is the first to understand that something is about to break. On the last day her son visits his parents, when his mother says goodbye, she makes the final maternal gesture—or perhaps it's the first—when she suggests that at least he still has time to save himself.

Unlike the mother of Map of an absence, that of The birthday She leaves her job, weakens her ties with her parents and shuts herself away at home to please her husband.

— The mother is both an accomplice and a victim of the system. She feels unable to escape because she has no alternative.

The one who constantly presents himself as the victim, however, is the father.

— The father uses victimization as a weapon of manipulation and blackmail. Although he appears powerful, he is fragile and small: despite everything, he is afraid of everyone. The system has placed the patriarchal hat on him, offering him violence as an instrument. If there is truth in this story, it is that the family suffers the consequences of a politically imposed system that doesn't work.

The son's solution is to abandon his family. He doesn't follow, but runs away.

— The solution the book proposes isn't a solution. I find this interesting. Nothing can resolve family tensions. It will always be a patch, a shortcut... The son claims the right to flee and withdraw. He does so out of a survival instinct, but it's also a scandalous critique of the world he lives in.

The mother chooses to deal with all the discomfort in silence. We don't know, however, how the sister takes it.

— I show the waste of a possible alliance between siblings, even though she shares with him the awareness of a deep generational distance from their parents. The son is clear that he doesn't want to be like his father and rejects the patriarchal system. The daughter would like to convince her mother to stand up to her husband as a woman. She accompanies him in his only attempt to distance herself, but then must surrender to the obvious: a mother's place is with her father.

How has the novel been received in Italy? Where might the narrator's journey have been related to your own?

— My discourse is and always will be literary. I reject any approach to the subject that isn't. That said, the book won the Strega Prize, the most important in the country, and has sold more than 100,000 copies. It has become a social object that has unleashed the liberation of many people and also the reactionary instinct. That's the best you can ask for in a novel.

A book as hard as The birthday Can you only write when you're well? There are several chapters dedicated to the process of counseling by a therapist.

— To write any book, you need to have reached shore after the shipwreck. During a storm, it's impossible. I say this regardless of whether the material is personal or not. To write, you need to be happy and in an optimistic mood. Otherwise, there's no point in finishing a single page.

Near the end of the novel we read one of the lessons the therapist learned from the narrator: "Among all the things I was grateful for was having explained to me that one of the ways of expressing violence was destruction, but that the other, more important and let's say virtuous, was precision." The precision of The birthday can do a lot of damage.

— It's the precision of art, which aspires not to destruction, but to metamorphosis. Art challenges one system to give rise to another; it creates insecurity and threatens the certainties shared by many people. Precision can unbalance you more than violence.

Surely many readers will wonder, when they finish The birthday, if the book has brought you and your parents closer together.

— The birthday It begins and ends with a son who has been estranged from his parents for ten years. What happens next is left out of the book. Perhaps I'll explain it one day.