June 23, 2022 51Place, Ernaux’s account of her own
father, the son of Normandy peasants
who eventually had his own small shop,
she describes how her book started out
as a novel but “halfway through the
book I began to experience feelings of
disgust.... In order to tell the story of
a life governed by necessity, I have no
right to adopt an artistic approach, or
attempt to produce something ‘moving’
or ‘gripping.’” Dispensing with “lyri-
cal reminiscences” and “triumphant
displays of irony,” she tells the story
“neutrally.” At its core is the language
divide between Ernaux, a Parisian in-
tellectual, and her subject, who stayed
rooted to the linguistic idiosyncrasies
of his class: his particular turns of
phrase, writes Ernaux, “defi ne the na-
ture and the limits of the world where
my father lived.” When she was a child,
expressing herself was “like walking
down a dark tunnel.” “How do you ex-
pect me to speak properly,” she cried
to her father, “if you keep on making
mistakes?”
Durastanti is separated from her par-
ents less by class than by “infl ections
and inaccessible fi gures of speech;
every irony separates us, every meta-
phor puts some distance between us.”
As a teenager she tried to explain fi g-
urative language to them, but she also
tried to inhabit their literalism. Once,
when her father was having nightmares
after the divorce, Durastanti gave him
a small white eraser with which to
“erase bad memories.”
These are lives that are also gov-
erned by necessity, but there is noth-
ing “neutral” in Durastanti’s narrative
strategy. While her parents do not like
novels, they would clearly like to be in
one, and Strangers I Know makes every
attempt to cross the threshold into
“moving” and “gripping”; the artful
approach, with its lyricism and irony, is
fully embraced. Durastanti depends on
metaphor because metaphor is the only
tool she has to describe her subjects’
opulent unknowability: her mother is
a “nebula,” her father is “the blackest
of galaxies that neutralized any theo-
retical physics.” Together they are “the
king and queen of thaumaturgy,” and
when Durastanti leaves home and her
parents disappear, the book loses its
magic because they are no longer there
to provide it.
Durastanti told The Paris Review
that having already written about her
family and childhood in her earlier
novels, she felt she could be “freer and
more experimental” in her handling
of the same material here. For exam-
ple, she is kidnapped by her father in
Strangers I Know, and in her second
novel, A Chloe, per le ragioni sbagli-
ate (To Chloe, for the Wrong Rea-
sons), a girl is also kidnapped by her
father, but the version in Strangers I
Know is the more “picaresque.” She
fi ctionalizes her family story because,
she says, it would not be believable as
nonfi ction. Take the time her grandfa-
ther bought headphones for his deaf
daughter:If you write that in fi ction, people
think, Oh, he’s a funny, demented
character in denial. But that’s a
real person. That was my grand-
father. I asked myself, How can I
land in an in- between space, where
the accounts are real but I’m han-
dling them, in tone, as if they were
fi ction?Durastanti’s tutor at college coined the
term “fi nction” to “defi ne something
that wasn’t false but built up,” and fi nc-
tion is a good enough description of
this extraordinary book.
It is hard to think what form Strang-
ers I Know might have taken if not one
in which the borders between fi ction
and nonfi ction are crossed, because
crossing borders is Durastanti’s sub-
ject. A translator as well as a writer, she
has been moving words from one lan-
guage to another all her life; she is at
home with semantic instability because
“everything I think and everything I
say suffers in the migration between
different countries.” There are cultural
and geographical border- crossings
too, because her parents moved to
New York City in the 1970s, and Du-
rastanti, who was born in Brooklyn in
1984, lived there for her fi rst six years
and returned annually for holidays.
And there are psychological borders
because, she reveals three quarters of
the way through the book,of the ten signs of borderline per-
sonality disorder, there was a time
when I exhibited eight. The border,
in me, was already drawn, and I’ve
always been asked to cross it: every
time I walked out my mother’s
door, I entered a different world,
and I had to learn its tricks and
codes, its beauty and systems, only
to trade them in for something
confusing and approximate every
time I stepped back inside.Durastanti’s attempts to bridge the
gap between herself and her family
are at the center of Strangers I Know.
These sections of the book break new
ground and are the reason why it has
been translated into twenty- one lan-
guages and is being made into a tele-
vision series. The account she gives of
being the child of deaf parents is richer
and far more disturbing than the one
presented in the award- winning fi lm
CODA (2021), a coming- of- age comedy
with a happy ending. To hear the world
as her parents do, Durastanti listens to
Sounds of Silence— The Most Intrigu-
ing Silences in Recording History!, an
anthology of silent music by Andy War-
hol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rob-
ert Wyatt, and others. She becomes
interested in the composer John Cage,
whose three- movement work 4'33"
consists of four minutes and thirty-
three seconds of silence.
Cage once visited a semi- anechoic
chamber at Harvard—a kind of anti-
echo chamber in which he could hearonly the high- pitched sound of his ner-
vous system and the deep thrumming
of his blood. The artist Doug Wheeler
made a similar room for his exhibition
“PSAD Synthetic Desert III” at New
York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2017.
Entering the installation, says Du-
rastanti, was like sinking down “a deep
hole.... I heard my own saliva, my stom-
ach rumbling, my eyelashes beating.”
It was a spatial and temporal as well as
aural experience, in which she returned
to her past, “with my parents, who’d al-
ways lived in a room like this one.” Her
parents, in their sound proof room, have
an enviable self- suffi ciency, and Du-
rastanti will always be the child kicking
her mother, screaming, “Speak, speak.”
The neatness of the book’s structure
barely contains the excess of the con-
tent: the problem of genre, the glam-
our of strangeness, the expansiveness
of silence, the limits of language. The
themes are so vast and so daunting
that the prose bends beneath their
weight, and certain passages feel as
though Durastanti were trying to put
the ocean in a chest of drawers. She is
more at ease with her parent’s unknow-
ability than her own, and the chapters
where she describes her life as a young
adult, moving to London to fi nd punk
rockers, attending raves by herself, and
being fi red from jobs, read as misery
memoir. The intellectual curiosity that
animates her childhood gives way to
a barren interior landscape in which
we get little traction; the tone is bleak
and despairing, and Durastanti’s desire
to disappear, which begins as a child-
hood game, becomes part of her mental
collapse.
Her parents’ ahistorical world is re-
placed by a city rooted in dates and
facts— it is 2011, “six years before the
Grenfell Tower fi re”— but Durastanti
is disengaged from historical prog-
ress. Unhappy with her partner, she
becomes “an accurate imitation of a
ghost,” but it is her parents she is im-
personating. Walking for miles as her
mother once did, Durastanti has a
similar sense of threat; appropriating
identities as her father liked to do, she
compares her “city anxiety” to those
of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Syl-
via Plath. Living in Newington Green,
the former habitat of a lover of Anne
Boleyn and, later, of the young Mary
Wollstonecraft, she is “caught between
a suffragette and a queen who lost her
head.”
Durastanti’s self- mythologies strike
an uncomfortable note. Her parents
never asked for the sympathy that
she now demands of her readers; her
grandmother, Durastanti recognizes,
translated herself to Brooklyn with
fewer resources and a good deal more
success than she had in London. What
is striking about these sections of the
book is how uncertain Durastanti is in
her autobiographical voice, which is ei-
ther too far away to be audible or else
comes at us with exaggerated volume.
Ill at ease in a real- life story, she wouldsooner be a character in a novel. (^) Q
The New York Review Summer Schedule
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Congratulations!
Recipients of Awards from
the American Academy of
Arts and Letters
AWARD FOR
DISTINGUISHED SERVICE
TO THE ARTS
Edwin Frank
Editorial Director and
Founder of NYRB Classics
HAROLD D. VURSELL
MEMORIAL AWARD
to a writer whose work
merits recognition for the
quality of its prose style
Joshua Cohen
Author of The Netanyahus
THORNTON WILDER PRIZE
FOR TRANSLATION
for a significant
contribution to the art of
literary translation
Edith Grossman
Translator of The Adventures
and Misadventures of
Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis
ARTS AND LETTERS
AWARD IN LITERATURE
honoring an exceptional
accomplishment in
any genre
Adrian Nathan West
Translator of When We
Cease to Understand the
World by Benjamín Labatut;
Charles Bovary, Country
Doctor: Portrait of A Simple
Man by Jean Améry; and
Pere Gimferrer
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