Strangers I Know: A Novel - Softcover

Durastanti, Claudia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059308795X ISBN 13: 9780593087954

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Durastanti casts the universal drama of the family as the sieve through which the self—woman, artist, daughter—is filtered and known." —Ocean Vuong
 
A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life.

Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving.
 
Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations, by turns hilarious and devastating. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock—and a tumultuous relationship—begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life.
 
Kinetic, formally dazzling, and spectacularly original, this book is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Claudia Durastanti is a former Italian Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome, and one of the founders of the Italian Literature Festival in London. She’s written for Granta, Bomb, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is the Italian translator for Ocean Vuong and the most recent edition of The Great Gatsby, among others. This novel is her fourth book, the first to be translated into English, and the winner of the Premio Pozzale Luigi Russo, the Premio Strega Off, and a finalist for the Premio Strega. For now, she lives in Rome.

Elizabeth Harris's translations from Italian include works by Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, Antonio Tabucchi, and Andrea Bajani. For her varios translations of Tabucchi, she has received an NEA Translation Fellowship, the Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award for prose. She lives in Wisconsin.

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Mythology

 

My mother and father met the day he tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere. It was a good place to jump-he was a fine swimmer, but once he hit the water, he'd be paralyzed, and the Tiber back then was already toxic and green.

 

My mother always walked liked it was raining, head down, shoulders hunched, especially when she was alone, but that day she stopped on the bridge, and saw a boy straddling the rail. She came closer, laid her hand on his shoulder, to pull him back; maybe they scuffled. She persuaded him to calm down, breathe slowly, then they took a walk through the city, got drunk, and wound up at a hotel with stiff sheets that stank of ammonia. Before dawn, my mother put her clothes on and left. She had to get back to her boarding school and my father seemed so restless; she didn't even shake his shoulder to let him know she was going.

 

The next day, she stepped outside the school with her girlfriends and saw him leaning against a car, his arms crossed, and right then, she knew she was doomed. I've always envied her mystical, woeful expression when she speaks of him at that moment; I've always been jealous of that apocalypse.

 

That day in front of her school, my father wore tapered jeans, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was smoking a Marlboro Red-he smoked two packs a day.

 

He'd come to pick her up in front of the state institute on Via Nomentana, and that's when their life together began.

 

"How did he manage to find me?" she'd say. When I was little and she told me this story, she transformed my father into a mysterious wizard who could capture us anytime, anywhere, and I hugged her tight and didn't answer and wondered what it was like to be desired that way by a man.

 

Then I grew up and started pointing out the obvious: "There was only one school for people like you in Rome. It couldn't have been all that hard." She'd nod, then shake her head: he found her because he had to. Though their marriage ended, she never regretted pulling him off that bridge: he was deaf, like her, and their relationship held something closer, something deeper, than love.

 

My father and mother met the day he tried to save her from an assault in front of the Trastevere station.

 

He'd stopped to buy cigarettes and was about to get back in his car when he noticed the sudden, erratic movements of two thieves; they were kicking a girl, trying to yank away her purse. After he threatened them and scared them off, he stopped to help my mother and persuaded her to go back home with him to wash up. He was still living with his parents: when they saw this girl-barely out of her teens, her dark skin, her hair wet from the shower-they thought she was an orphan.

 

At age twenty, my mother had a wide, bawdy smile, smoker's teeth, straight black hair to her shoulders, not a good look on anyone; sometimes she pulled her hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette. She lived at boarding school but often stayed out at night; she studied sporadically. She took small jobs to supplement what her parents sent from America, but she rarely showed up to work on time.

 

From the day he appeared, they started going out: they spoke the same language composed of gasps and words pronounced too loudly, but it was their behavior that drew looks on the street. They shoved past people as they walked, not turning to apologize, exuding difference: he had light brown hair, full lips, aristocratic features; she barely came to his shoulder and seemed to have stepped out of some guerrilla squad.

 

Back then, my father would pop up out of nowhere: often, when she'd be leaving to see her family in America or disappearing for a few days, or much later, when they'd separated, and he showed up at the departures terminal at the exact right moment, or else appeared behind a glass door, or stepped off an elevator, or slammed the car door so she'd look up a moment.

 

She recognized him from his slouched posture, the flicker of his cigarette. He'd find her like a wounded, bleeding hunter looking for his prey, when he has no other senses to rely on and must trust his own raging instincts. My father and mother divorced in 1990. They've seen each other only a few times since, but both will start their story off by saying they saved the other's life.

 

Childhood

 

My mother was born at the end of 1956, on a farm along the Agri river, in Basilicata. During the winter my maternal grandparents usually lodged in town, not out on this half-ruined farm, but that day they were caught in an unexpected snowstorm and so my mother was born in a stall surrounded by cats and bony farm animals.

 

Her parents worked the fields and she spent a lot of time with her grandmothers. One of them was an accidental American, like me: she was born in Ohio, where her father was just passing through-we don't know anything about this nomad or perhaps mercenary soldier, only that he sparked a series of thoughtless migrations-and then she'd moved to Basilicata with her mother, turning into a reverse immigrant who abandoned the future to disintegrate into the past. (At age six I did the same: I moved from Brooklyn to a Lucanian village with more livestock than people.) In town she was treated like a mysterious stranger: though she never used her English, she always had odd products, denim clothes that didn't wear out and candles that burned for hours but never dripped. My mother's other grandmother was silent and vulnerable, her world defined by ashen ghosts in the sky, exorcisms performed with a silver spoon laid on a forehead; she walked barefoot in processions and was convinced she had special contact with the Madonna.

 

When I was little, my mother would take me for walks along the river near where she was born, and it was hard for me to envision this as the mythic rushing water she'd been immersed in to lower her fever from meningitis when she was four years old. As soon as they realized she had a high temperature, they ran to dip her in the river, but according to the doctors and neighbors, that impulsive remedy was useless. The infection could make her go blind, crazy, deaf, even kill her, and all the women watching over her existence, praying beside the cot where she lay twisted and lifeless, voted for deafness. It would be hard, but at least she'd see the world, and find a way to make herself understood.

 

My grandpa Vincenzo was short, dark, and a womanizer. When he and my grandma Maria immigrated to America in the sixties, they didn't go because they were poor-which they were-or because they needed a better job-which they did; they went because he'd chased after all the women in town, and this was painful for my grandmother. He played the accordion at weddings and parties, wore dark pants and rolled his sleeves to his elbows; not a trace of gray showed in his slicked-back hair. Theirs was an arranged marriage: they were first cousins, and sometimes, hearing the village gossip, it was this evil mixing of blood that made my uncles turn out short and my mother eventually go deaf. My grandparents may have violated the laws of proximity and been punished for it, but my mother lost her hearing because she contracted an infectious disease, and my uncles were short like many other children in Southern Italy years ago. Aristocrats and vampires paired off to mate, to preserve the species, while unscrupulous anthropologists insisted that various African tribes did so to avoid being cursed, when actually these tribes had precise codes to prevent lovers from being too close in blood; sometimes a girl couldn't even be promised to a boy with the same animal guide, and who knows, perhaps that's why love...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059308795X
• ISBN 13: 9780593087954
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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