Reasons to break ties with dad and mom

The birthday, by Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975), is a story somewhere between a novel and autofiction that deals with the liberation of a man who dismantles the totalitarianism of the most important institution: the family. And it is even more commendable that the author is Italian and has the courage to break the taboo of the family, a concept that is nothing more than a hypocritical social convention like all formalities.

Some might wonder what leads someone to write a first-person account that explains the fateful relationship with their parents, with a tone that swings between the pathos of the dysfunctional family and the victimhood of someone who has run away, legs help me. But Bajani—despite the unequivocal autobiographical details—constructs the story of a self who suffered relentless domestic violence. This construction is done, on the one hand, without explaining everything, with the aim that the reader fills the silences as they wish or as their own experience leads them to do so and, on the other, with an emotional, physical and mental distance that the author finds necessary to be able to narrate the experience from the calm and security of the present—and after undergoing psychotherapy.

This present-day narrative takes place ten years after he broke off his ties with his father and mother. He left home because he couldn't take it anymore; he was in the doldrums, and a lifeline had to be built. He realized what his father was doing to him, his sister, and his mother, a woman "dominated by a form of shyness very close to self-denial," and completely sacrificed, whom the author wants to dignify. The birthday and make her an independent character. She also becomes aware that, in some way, all three were complicit in this repugnant patriarchal system. The memories speak of emotional rifts, of imposed social isolation, the assignment of roles by an authoritarian, controlling, sexist father, expert in frightening everyone by exercising a power that no one challenged. A father who, in parallel, is described as a fragile and fearful man who takes out his frustration on the family. Andrea Bajani doesn't erase the wounds: she transforms them into poetry. And she starts with a title that refers to the tenth anniversary of the day the narrator last saw his parents and decided to separate forever.

Based on two mythical models such as Oedipus and the prodigal son from the Gospel of Luke (both clash with their families and grow apart), The birthday It is also a reflection on memory and its inherent fragility and tyranny. That's why the reader will be able to differentiate the Narrator-Character from the Son-Character, because the narrator constructs the story of the son's life with metaliterary phrases that warn that he is not writing a conventional novel, but rather a story where there are two men who are both equal and opposite at the same time, both seeking spaces to defend themselves. Andrea Bajani is clear that language is the only tool to explore environments, psychologies, wills, desires, and, above all, the male violence capable of exploiting the world.