The Anniversary
Irreducible talent ... The writing may seem a bit woolly...but the contradictions are flagrant ... Translations are always destined to pale before the original.
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It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father ... The triumph of this short, sometimes heartbreaking book is its patient attention to human psychology; and its narrator’s attempt at fair accounting is a constant riposte to the totalitarian monomania of his father.
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Bajani carefully calibrates the tensions in the story, a balancing act that Geoffrey Brock skilfully retains in his English translation ... All this provides plenty to chew on, though occasionally Bajani’s prose can be more glutinous than nutritious. He has an insatiable appetite for the overblown metaphor ... The novel works best when Bajani speaks plainly of the torturous family dynamics ... As the book closes, we regain the purity of that teasing opening, where we wondered about the period without his parents being the best of his life. And despite the occasional bumps along the way, the ending works beautifully: plangent and intimate, as complex and contradictory as a family.
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