Claudia, the narrator of “Strangers I Know”, begins her story by describing her unusual situation as the daughter of deaf parents who've never taught her sign language. They can speak to each other because her parents read lips, but they still establish a very unique form of communication as Claudia invents imperfect hand gestures to convey what she wants to say. Her parents aren't necessarily trustworthy as they tell her contradictory stories about how they met. Nor can she rely upon them for stable parenting because of their erratic behaviour and tendency to leave: “I missed my mother when she disappeared, but she was a nebula and my father, the blackest of galaxies that neutralized any theoretical physics: my brother was the first matter I could gather around.” Claudia's sense of national identity is also divided as she grows up amongst relatives in both America and Italy. From this perspective we see how Claudia has a special relationship to history, truth, language and the ways in which experience is codified. This curious novel is part coming of age tale and part essay collection as we see her life and ideas filtered through her unique position.
In a way I wish the novel had continued in a similar vein to the first half of the book which is primarily concerned with describing the narrator's parents and extended family both in New York City and a small village in Southern Italy. The details and description of their habits are intriguing and playful, but a fully rounded understanding of their lives gets lost as the narrator goes on to analyse their circumstances and conveys her theories about various subjects. Though the book progresses largely in chronological order it becomes increasingly fragmented with ideas trailing off into metaphors and logic that trips over the narrator's limited knowledge. While a lot of fiction is “autobiographically inspired” there seems little point to the confusing blur here between narrator as author and Claudia as a character. The structure of the book seems to reflect the narrator's assertion that “The story of a family is more like a map than a novel, and an autobiography is the summation of all the geologic ages you've passed through.” However, this way of presenting Claudia's experiences left me with a very patchy understanding of her life as a whole and interesting concepts get quickly dropped before they can be fully explored.
Certain impressions from this book have stuck with me such as the way Claudia develops a love of reading when she moves to Italy and also begins to lie about how much she's read. It's compelling how she expresses the disconnect she feels between her sense of place and the actual experience of living there. There are also several emotionally charged descriptions which are memorable including her sense of alienation from the other children at her school: “I was still an island at my desk in the middle of the room, with stagnant water all around.” But these aspects of the book don't add up to a very satisfying picture of her life because so many details are used as reference points to larger ideas the narrator expounds upon rather than telling a more complete story. Later scenes in the book such as time living in London, a conflict with her first employer and a friend who suffers from drug addiction pass too fleetingly and allude to situations more complex than the author allows space for. While I admire fiction that resists sticking to the conventions of genre, I feel like the structure Durastanti has created for this book mostly amounts to a series of interesting suggestions rather than forming a fully realised and completely satisfying picture.
