'Constellation' by Andrea Bajani, is drawn from the author's 2025 novel
'L’anniversario' (The Anniversary) originally published in Italian.
It’s told from the perspective of a man who, ten years after cutting off his parents, reflects on their lives and on his upbringing.
The book has been translated from Italian to English by Geoffrey Brock and will be published in end August. This translated excerpt titled 'Constellation' is published in The New Yorker on June 7, 2026.
The narrator remembered his childhood, the violence in the family, propagated by his high-school drop-out father, and silent suffered by his college-educated mother. Police were called by his neighbors, but no charges were ever pressed. There were only the mess after to clean up, and pained silences in the home.
The readers aren't privy to the plausible reasons behind the household violence. Is it a sense of inferiority that stemmed from their teenaged years? A reason to marry when the relationship wasn't balanced? A misplaced ideal of love? I don't know how much their respective families and childhood contributed to the young adults they eventually became, or had any hand in making them choose a partner so different from the families they were raised in.
To the readers, it seemed like a relationship doomed to fail. The narrator's parents are so different as youths. And his father is such a chauvinist. We don't know if the mother is a pushover, but she seems to have accepted her fate and her role in life with this family and her chosen spouse.
“This is a book for your mother” was my father’s way of declaring that a novel wasn’t any good. The phrase did contain a kind of affection, the perverse, frank, aggressive kind that follows, or underlines, an assertion of control. To admit such a book to our home library—which he, an eager autodidact, had gradually built over the years—was a concession he made to her. But labelling a book as “for your mother” meant, above all, that its proper place was in the bin.
I don’t remember where all these supposedly second-rate novels came from, the ones that ended up on my mother’s nightstand. I know some were gifts from my father himself, birthday or Christmas presents wrapped in bookstore paper. She’d unwrap them and say thank you. Eventually, even she began to say “these are books for me,” as if seeing herself through his eyes—holding on, through self-deprecation, only to the part of the phrase that passed for affection.
The marriage of the narrator's parents and the birth of the children locked in the mother's fate. She never worked as the teacher she had once hoped to be, with her college diploma. The father, without a high school diploma, got a sales job at a luggage shop, and became the breadwinner of the family.
The narrator remembered this upbringing and many violent incidents, the emotional blackmail and powerplay. I get that he doesn't like it, and chose to leave and distanced himself from them after gradauting from college. I don't know where the story leads. I guess that would have to wait for the full novel to be released in two months. I'm not sure I would want to know. If I chance upon it the novel, I'll read it.
For my mother, though, it also marks an end. Or at least the closing of a life path that a college diploma might have cleared the way for. Had she become a teacher, that ceremony might have been unbearable for my father. But it was perfectly bearable now that she would merely be a mother, a wife at home, cooking and minding the children, with little interest in anything else—least of all in books or in literature, which from that point on he claimed for himself. Her role also provided him with an identity that had been culturally and socially sanctioned for centuries: he would be the husband-father who sacrificed everything out of duty to his family. That was the identity to which he now dedicated himself, and my mother accepted it because being a mother was still, after all, something. And we kids accepted it, too: our mother cooked, did crossword puzzles, and drowsed on the couch while our father read.
Is who we are now affected by what we experienced or remembered in childhood? For me, that's a yes. It shaped who I am, and who I do not wish to be. I don't even know if some of those earlier memories are real or I meshed them up somehow from different memories. They don't matter now.
I can't tell if I'm a better person for those childhood experiences, or worst. I certainly did not suffer. I had a great childhood, although on hindsight, I know that I shouldn't have kept quiet about certain things. I know my moral principles and fundamental values, but they might not align to what the wider society expects or adhere to the prevailing social norms.
In an interview with the same journal, the author is asked if the narrator is trustworthy. He explained,
The story is framed as one that the narrator himself is writing, and throughout it, he intimates that he’s not being entirely faithful to fact: “It’s just a retrospective wish, another invention.” Why does he go to pains to qualify his memories? And should we trust his narrative more or less as a result?
One thing that has always fascinated me is the coexistence of two beliefs: that our personality—what makes us who we are—is formed in the earliest years of life, and that we retain hardly any memory of what happened to us in those years. It suggests that we remain a mystery to ourselves throughout our lives. I like to think that art is the little probe we send to look around in the black box, though always with the knowledge that what it reveals may be pure invention. The narrator is caught up in a process of rewriting every story he has inherited, including the version of himself that he has invented over the years. Uncertainty is his territory, and it is also the territory of his painful but necessary rebirth.
