The difficulty of processing a shared difference from the rest of society is the defining characteristic of Strangers I Know (2022), the text, originally published as La straniera and shortlisted for the Premio Strega in 2019, which represents Claudia Durastanti’s unorthodox upbringing and her formation in a family context of disability, poverty, and estrangement. In a porous blend of fiction and autobiography, which expresses not just a desire for self-expression but for a life story, Durastanti illustrates how “the story of a family is more like a map than a novel” (60), plotting with kaleidoscopic variety the coordinates of the people and places through which she has passed, tracing the delicate details of how she, too, though non-disabled and, in many senses, emancipated, came to be a person marked by difference and distance. In a series of reflections which start from the family and move through travel, health, work, money, and love, she oscillates deliberately (the text is ideally “meant to be read in nonlinear fashion,” 258) between past and present, here and there, self and other, exploring the emotional spaces we create with our words and the linkage between language and self-understanding.
The landscape of Durastanti’s childhood is unstable, characterized by a series of uprootings. Lurching from Brooklyn to Basilicata following her parents’ separation, she must assimilate a simultaneous geographical, cultural, and linguistic shift as well as a fundamental shift in identity: from Italian in diaspora to southern Italian, two modes of displaced “Italian-ness” which have historically complicated the narrative of national identity. She is transported by her mother to the timeless land of Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), and though Durastanti’s Lucania has the same geographical markers as Carlo Levi’s, it is no longer simply “a territory known only for hypnotic sunsets and briganti caves” (130), but bears the signs of Americanization and mass-market consumerism. It is, in other words, a place like any other, whose homogeneity brings her family’s difference sharply into relief.
As a young person, Durastanti knows herself to be, in the words of neighbors, “the child of the mute” (104). Rather than subject herself to the scrutiny of unsympathetic teachers and peers, she regularly skips school to spend long hours reading in the attic, a space where books grant her the gifts of vocabulary and metaphor, and what others say about her family matters little. Her imperviousness and refusal are inherited characteristics, passed down by parents who refused to accept their poverty and disability as fatalities but rather lived defiantly through these conditions, against the static complacency of the surrounding world. Symbolic of this, they remained obstinate in their aversion to using sign language with hearing people and preferred to lip-read. They would rather communicate on their own terms than on someone else’s, a propensity which Durastanti also shares. As a writer and a translator, she avers, “everything I think and everything I say suffers in the migration between different countries” (105), and so she is not afraid to make mistakes, to err, to produce a language which is unlike that of others.
Alongside the instability of the spoken and written word, Durastanti dwells on the power of the non-verbal in her life, from the “hoarse screams before the mirror” (82) of adolescent nightmares, to the “spite” that she describes as “the preferred mode of communication” (37) of her father and that manifests in vicious acts. In a poignant example of the value of wordless gestures, as a child, Claudia is the only member of the family to reach out, physically, to the uncle gravely sick with AIDS. By showing that she is not afraid to eat from the spoon he has used, she extinguishes the “shame” in her uncle’s eyes, and demonstrates that it is not only words which speak: “There are gestures that feel like they don’t belong to us, rash decisions that define our entire lives, until we realize that they were ours from the start, that we controlled them, owned them. They weren’t accidental gestures but translations of a deeper language” (90).
In Durastanti’s narration, this deeper language of the self is as much informed by the intrusion of popular culture as the reality of lived events. Her own father’s taciturnity and volatility, for instance, are illuminated and take on nightmarish proportions by association with the exaggerated fictional version of paternal violence in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–91), which Durastanti watched as a teenager. In her memories, the fate of Laura Palmer (which is also tied up with the fate of a real disappeared girl, Ylenia Carrisi) brings a created world of “voodoo, enigmatic statements before a supposed suicide, a black balcony and a blond girl who vanished into nothing” into contact with the real world, which is supposedly also, according to the superstitions of southern Italy, threatened by werewolves and men with evil intent (82). “If we weren’t careful,” Durastanti recalls, “even a father could turn into something else, like Laura Palmer’s father, like my father” (82). This and manifold other references to literature, music, film, and television reveal a firm belief that fiction matters to self-formation. Though it may be convenient to grow up believing that “each indentation or scar or depression in your own body and being bore the name of a mother or a father,” in reality “this is rarely all true” (257). Instead, people are a patchwork: “The cracks you contain are not just family, history, or geography: fiction hurts, imagination hurts. Strangers you never met hurt, in celluloid and on paper” (258).
You are you, the disjointed cultural references strewn across the text suggest, by virtue of the distinct and personal way in which you are touched by the things which you touch, some of which are aesthetic objects, set in worlds which apparently have nothing to do with you. Writing, for Durastanti, is a response to the manifold “cracks” of which she is made, many of which are aesthetic, but some of which are undoubtedly parental, prompting a desire for a literary arsenal with which to defend herself from both the silences and the shattering pronouncements of her mother and father.
A further convention which their deafness refuses is that of literature, of ornamental language. Where “in my family lexicon everything was meant to wound” (124), parents who have neither the inclination nor the capacity for metaphor cast subconscious scorn upon the literary disposition of their daughter:
While I was trying to create order through writing, they were still in contact with the ungovernable, always drawing me back into the suspicion that words only mean something if they’re literal, and anything left over is a great waste of time and emotion: life is a silent, hypnotic seduction, and all the rest is failure. (64–5)
The unlyrical and unliterary quality of their existence destabilizes the literary endeavor at its core, revealing the failure and the artifice inherent in poetic language. Their resistance to literary representation, wrapped up with their entire way of being in the world, confirms for Durastanti that “writing is just that: the stigma of the one remaining” (85). Indeed, Laura Palmer’s story in Twin Peaks is as much about Agent Cooper as it is about Laura herself, who ultimately eludes any neat narrative of what “truly” happened. So, too, the story of Durastanti’s parents and the other strangers she knows is as much about her (the true stranger) as it is about them, and it is a story, like Laura’s, without resolution.
Literature, then, even as it idolizes those who leave, remains within the purview of those who stay. Gaps in language, which orderly prose desires to plug, echo those gaps in meaning which circumscribe the tragic parts of life and confirm, beneath the platitudes, that “time’s not healing at all: there’s a breach that can’t be filled” (61). The only story Durastanti realizes she can “truly” tell is her own, and her parents’, in any case, was never hers in the first place, was already given to her, in kindly or pitying words, by others: “Their deafness was a story someone told me. Someone pointed out a difference in my parents, and I started to branch out, drawing the boundaries of where I stood, and where they were” (259).
The final sections, “Health,” “Work & Money,” and “Love,” which intertwine the ongoing family story with Durastanti’s move to London in adulthood, elevate the text’s insistence on the unresolved and the incommunicable to its peak. As quickly as language comes upon us, assaulting the senses and demanding that we master it in order to participate in the life of the world in a meaningful capacity, it can recede. Her mother, Durastanti writes, now employs, after years of sensorial and social isolation, a language which is a direct reflection of the quality of her life: marked by solitude, the bad TV which she watches with imperfectly synced subtitles, and the worst excesses of the conspiratorial internet forums which she consults. We are, Durastanti suggests, the sum, slippery and always being recalculated, of our shifting associations. This is sometimes, as in her mother’s case, a loss or a regression, but often it is a thing of beauty and a source of wonder—a thing not to be reduced or explained away, for it means that in each of us there is “[a]n intimate rebellion against the laws by which we grow and become satisfied and unchanging, when we’ve always been departure upon departure: tears, sutures, and cuts” (238). For her parents, the point of departure, their permanent experience of being cut off from the rest of the world, is most others’ endpoint: “Sooner or later, we all become disabled” (38).
Like Natalia Ginzburg in her 1963 memoir of the same name, Claudia Durastanti traces an eclectic and idiosyncratic “lessico famigliare” (family lexicon), which nevertheless zooms out from the personal to invite readerly reflection on the quality of our own words and the character of our own linguistic choices. Strangers I Know is every inch a “linguistic autobiography,” to borrow the formulation which Jhumpa Lahiri uses to describe her own endeavor at self-representation in In Other Words (2016). Like Ginzburg and Lahiri, Durastanti establishes herself as a voice within a family of women’s writing in Italian which seeks to articulate tensions between language and identity, and to show how any medium of communication contains within its lacunae and ellipses the ghosts of the unspoken or the unspeakable (both good and bad). Elizabeth Harris’ translation for Fitzcarraldo Editions offers Durastanti’s memoir to an English-speaking audience in a rich and meticulous rendering of a text which grapples with how a person can write of herself when “meaning doesn’t take on a stable form for me” (105). Strangers I Know is a literary migration across “an original and irreplaceable landscape called I” (257), whose components are at once parental and more-than-parental. “I’m the daughter,” Durastanti concludes, “of a man who never jumped off a bridge: every time I feel myself hit the water, I rise. When everything collapses, love remains” (255). “But is it a true story?” (255), she wonders. Perhaps it does not matter.
