50 The New York ReviewMeet the Parents
Frances WilsonStrangers I Know
by Claudia Durastanti,
translated from the Italian
by Elizabeth Harris.
Riverhead, 294 pp., $27.00Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know,
published in Italy as La straniera (The
Stranger, or The Foreigner), is a nonfic-
tion novel about her parents, who hate
fiction. “Whenever we watch some-
thing,” she says of her mother,there’s always a moment when she
says, “But is it a true story?”— even
if we’re watching a horror movie—
and I have to lie because if I told
her it’s completely made up, she’d
lose interest and we’d never be able
to do anything together again.Words, if not literal, are a waste of
time. For her father,movies like Scarface and Evil
Dead are documentaries, real- life
stories. Every time I tried to ex-
plain that “this never happened,”
to introduce him to the subtleties
of fiction, he’d protest and wave me
off, sometimes enraged.Durastanti’s parents— now divorced—
are drinkers, gamblers, and dissemblers.
They are also profoundly deaf. It was
not love that drew them together but
likeness, because, her mother explains,
“there’s no love between deaf people—
it’s a fantasy of hearing. There’s sex, in-
timacy, but not the need for love. Being
alike is everything.”
As narrators, they are therefore
unreliable, and Durastanti begins
with their conflicting and coalescing
mythologies. In her mother’s version
of how they met, her father was about
to jump off the parapet of the Sisto
Bridge in Rome and she talked him out
of it. In her father’s version, he saved
her mother from being assaulted and
robbed outside a railway station. Ei-
ther way, “they spoke the same lan-
guage, composed of gasps and words
pronounced too loudly.... They shoved
past people as they walked, not turning
to apologize.” The day after they met,
her mother says, he turned up outside
her boarding school, leaning against
his car in jeans and a blue shirt with his
arms crossed and a Marlboro Red be-
tween his lips. From that moment on,
Durastanti writes, repeating the lan-
guage of the Harlequin romances that
her mother reads as real- life stories,
“she was doomed.”
Strangers I Know is Durastanti’s fourth
novel, and the second to be translated
into English. It is composed of forty-
one nonchronological chapters with
titles like “Mythology,” “Bones of Mo-
lasses,” and “Office Clothes,” grouped
into six thematic sections whose titles—
“Family,” “Travels,” “Health,” “Work
and Money,” “Love,” and “What’s Your
Sign”— are borrowed from the horo-
scopes her mother consumes. A hard
book to get inside, and harder to get out
of, it needs to be taken slowly and then
reread; Durastanti sets out to disorient
but also displays her own disorientation.
This is a weakness but equally a
strength. While the book is principally
about her family, it is also a bildungs-roman about the struggle of a young
writer named Claudia Durastanti to
find a story of her own when her par-
ents have a monopoly on stories. In
an interview with The Paris Review,
Durastanti said that once she revealed
to people that her parents were deaf
artists who split up, she feared they
“would lose interest in me and my voice
and what I do— instead they would be
hooked on my parents’ story.” How
can the child of such a couple live up
to their feral glamour without either
“dying or going mad”?Durastanti’s mother, who is not
named in the book, even has her own
nativity scene: she was born during
a snowstorm in 1956, in the stall of a
half- ruined farm in Basilicata filled
with cats and bony animals. When she
was four years old meningitis damaged
her cochlea, but for a few years, before
entering the “hyperbaric chamber of
silence,” she retained some residual
hearing. “Sounds came and went,”
writes Durastanti, “and the world was
a place of nightmarish ghosts and sud-
den howls.... It’s like she lived with
someone behind her, always trying to
scare her.” Today, with no hearing at
all, her mother is disturbed by manic-
persecutory delusions in the form of
hissing, vibrations, and ringing noises
that she believes are the voices of the
dead making contact. It’s a wonder,
her doctor says, that she doesn’t kill
herself.
When Durastanti’s mother was
twelve, her parents immigrated to
Brooklyn, leaving her in a school forthe deaf in Rome where the nuns
taught her to scream by holding a knife
on her tongue and making her touch
live wires. She disappeared for days
at a time, hanging out with street peo-
ple and runaways, walking the borders
of the city and sleeping in the Bor-
ghese Gardens or some other park. “I
just wanted to feel free,” she tells her
daughter. She continued these excur-
sions even after her two children were
born, going by foot from town to town
while Durastanti and her older brother
waited at home, wondering if she would
ever return. Sometimes she took Clau-
dia with her as a “hostage,” the two
of them seen as “destitute” by people
driving by.
Her mother learned sign language at
school but used it only within the deaf
community; she did not want her par-
ents, or later her children, to sign, be-
cause the theatricality of the gestures
drew attention to her disability. Instead
she chose to lip- read “until her eyes
and nerves were shot,” and to talk in
her too- loud voice with her inconsis-
tent accent so that she “seemed like an
immigrant with bad grammar.”
Durastanti, who was taught to speak
properly by her brother (whose own
Italian came from television shows),
communicates with her parents in a
“half- hearing, half- mute pidgin,” but
everyone in her family has a private
language whose meanings circulate
in a “black market.” Her American
grandmother says “Bruklì” instead
of Brooklyn, “porchecciapp” for pork
chops, and “aranò” rather than I don’t
know, and her mother, when she goes
on Facebook, will post a solitary let-ter of the alphabet like Q, X, M, or Z.
Asked by Durastanti what these letters
mean, she replies that they mean noth-
ing at all: “What’re you supposed to say
on Facebook then?”
Durastanti’s father, who is also not
named in the book, was born deaf. A
poor boy who looked like a rich boy, he
was handsome enough to be an actor,
but his life itself was a performance.
He too signed only within the deaf
community; otherwise he slammed
the table, stomped the floor, and read
lips.
As a teenager he was having sex with
the local widows, and at eighteen he
discovered how movies invite you to
cross a threshold and become someone
else. He turned into Marlon Brando
when he saw Last Tango in Paris and
Travis Bickle after watching Ta xi
Driver. Convinced at one point that
he was a mercenary soldier, he showed
his daughter the collection of knives
he kept in the glove compartment of
the car. A “wizard who could capture
us anytime, anywhere,” he had a ca-
pacity for shapeshifting such that he
never seemed quite real to Durastanti:
“I’ve seen my father throw himself into
the fury and mania of certain fictional
characters to the point of being a piece
of celluloid, burnt along the edges.”
Told by her older brother that their
parents were actors pretending to be
deaf to get into their parts, Durastanti
had no difficulty believing the story.
She remembers kicking her mother and
screaming, “Speak, speak,” until both
of them were crying.
One of the many family fictions is
that Durastanti’s mother is not really
deaf; instead she is “a foreigner,” “an
incomprehensible girl.” Her broth-
ers still speak to her in dialect, their
mouths barely opening, and one
brother bought her a Walkman that she
hooked to the belt of her jeans so she
could pretend to listen to songs while
cleaning the house. “Aren’t you crazy
about this band?” she’d ask, perplexing
houseguests. She likes Bob Dylan and
Patti Smith, and has collections of their
lyrics; until Durastanti’s first visit to a
record shop, she didn’t realize that they
sang as well.
Every year her mother watches all
five days of the Sanremo music festival
on television, following the words as
subtitles. It is, for her, a competition for
the best true story; she takes literally
the suggestion that people are prepared
to kill or die for love. “Both my par-
ents,” says Durastanti, “cling to words
for what they are, but they’re also sus-
picious, like many deaf people, always
afraid there are those conspiring about
meanings behind their back.” While
her parents “interpret life as fact,” they
also, Durastanti told The Paris Review,
“embod[y] the non- distinction between
fiction and nonfiction.” Embodying a
non- distinction is typical of Durastan-
ti’s own lingo, which is a tough wave
band to tune in to.One way of understanding what Du-
rastanti is up to in Strangers I Know
is to compare her to Annie Ernaux, a
writer she admires and who is similarly
interested in problems of language,
life- writing, and genre. In A Man’sClaudia Durastanti; illustration by Laura LannesWilson 50 51 .indd 50 5 / 26 / 22 3 : 49 PM