The Anniversary<\/a><\/em>, refusing to even name his characters, as the now-adult son of the family marks ten years since he last spoke to either of his parents. He retells their story and his in sparse but significant terms, painting the picture of a marriage marked by power, control, terror, and maybe even violence, but in a voice that allows the narrator to examine his own feelings through two lenses, how he felt at the time and how he feels now with the benefit of time and distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe narrator\u2019s father is the obvious villain in the story, as he is cut from similar cloth to David Melrose in Edward St. Aubyn\u2019s Melrose novels and Sam Pollit in Christina Stead\u2019s The Man Who Loved Children<\/em>, terrorizing first his wife and then his entire family with his outbursts, his vicious tongue, and later his delusions, like believing he\u2019s capable of giving his enemies cancer through his mental powers. The narrator begins with his parents meeting, telling how his mother was actually the more educated one, heading to university when her husband-to-be dropped out of high school, dreaming of a job as a teacher while he had to take a sales job because it was all that was available to him. He compensated for this power imbalance by taking her down through his words, eventually pressuring her into abandoning her studies and her hopes of a career so she could be first his servile housewife and later a stay-at-home mother to the two children they would have in quick succession after marrying. The husband set a perimeter around his wife and tightened it slowly over time, limiting her contact with her own parents, then her friends, and eventually isolating her almost completely in their apartment until the children were nearly grown.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe narrator was a witness to much of this behavior, but did little to stop it or push back until he was much older, and even in early adulthood remained obsequious to his domineering father and cipher mother, still largely obeying his father\u2019s wishes or orders well into his 30s. His slightly older sister, from whom he is also estranged, although less strictly so, couldn\u2019t get out of that environment quickly enough; there\u2019s much less on their relationship, but it is clear from the hints Bajani drops that it\u2019s also quite complicated, with resentment in both directions, her willingness to protect him somewhat as a child turning into disdain for his obeisance to their father in adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n