The banality of the Bajani method, fresh winner of the Strega
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Strega Prize 2025
The rejection of family, the escape from family, the abandonment of family, happiness without family. Writing a novel is a praiseworthy act in itself, it would be better not to surround it with the poor and confused critical experience
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One sleepless night I happened to watch a few TV inserts about the Strega Prize and its winner Andrea Bajani. The chatter in favor of the camera and Ninfeo, no matter who the winner of a literary prize is or what he thinks, always risks being a bit predictable and banal. Bajani is a Turin native with a thoughtful and charming profile, he sold his literary goods with a strange idea of the originality of the work and the novel form, with all its complexity, as he says . The theme is the rejection of the family, the escape from the family, the abandonment of the family and the redemption of the fugitive son in the happiness of the outcome. Away from the family, I was happy. Reworking the famous incipit of Anna Karenina, families are all unhappy and all unhappy in the same way, due to the patriarchy and the family's inability to ensure the individual's right to feel safe, to a safe space (Bajani teaches at an American university, he is a campus man, he insists a lot on this mysterious space of safety which is the most incomprehensible mantra of workism).
Those who read books, those who write them, those who hear them spoken of as idols, those who practice cultural pollination without reserve or subtlety think of themselves as a battalion of resistance fighters working for a better future, but in some cases they can turn out to be a rearguard phalanx that only plays defense and has the strange heroic taste of battles already won and won again. The family in its Victorian form, not to mention the Karenina who chose her safe space in a railway station by throwing herself under a train in search of happiness and immortality beyond the line of darkness of marriage, love, motherhood, was deconstructed, as they say today, in the investigation of provincial life, Middlemarch, by Marie Anne Evans or George Eliot, the male stage name of the patriarchal gender of a writer of unparalleled depth and complexity. Marriage, family, love, generation, and revolt are incandescent materials, difficult to maneuver after a century or two of experimentation and glory, before, during, and after the modernist moment. We should be wary of simplifications disguised as complexifications. Then there was the great break in the idea of the uterine family as a viaticum of schizophrenia and madness, with Laing and Cooper destroying the oppressive family bond of individual freedom and generator of mental terror, came the famous 1968 with its dispersed family, there was the declining demographic curve, contraception, divorce, abortion, the LGBTQI identity movement and Gay Pride, transgenderism, so that discovering today or relaunching the escape from the family has a rearview mirror effect and a detox herbal tea flavor of which Bajani does not seem entirely aware.
Another writer, Edoardo Albinati, had also won the Strega a few years ago, with a magnificent novel, La scuola cattolica, in which everything was about the crisis of the family but through the story of a generation, of a neighborhood, of a secular and church-based way of education and customs, with the spectacular dramatic irruption of the rapist patriarchy over four hundred pages of a novel that lasted more than thirteen hundred, the Circeo massacre . Which was not, as the survivor of the massacre Donatella Colasanti replied to one of her interviewers and as emerges from Albinati's story, a simple case of rape and femicide to be judged with tangled ideological categories, but much more, a violence steeped in moral ambiguity and protected by the submissiveness of state justice and the influential presence of families. A bit easy, adolescent, to escape from the family and call for applause for a solution that hides the cruelty of the problem, irreducible to any space of safety. In short, one writes a novel, a praiseworthy act in itself, it would be better if he did not surround it with his poor and confused critical experience, throwing it into the mess of the social and the political at the pace of his own delays.
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