Silence as Grammar: On Claudia Durastanti’s La Straniera

Imagine a household where silence is not an absence but a grammar. Where the hands speak before the mouth does, where a child learns to read faces the way other children learn to read pages, and where the word foreigner applies not only to the country you inhabit but to the very medium in which you are expected to exist. This is the world Claudia Durastanti reconstructs in La Straniera — published in English as Strangers I Know (Fitzcarraldo / Riverhead), and in Portuguese as Sempre Esrangeira (Dom Quixote - Portugal) / A Estrangeira (Todavia - Brazil),— and it is a world so precisely rendered that you feel the specific weight of its air long before you have finished the first chapter. Not the air of any single place, but the composite air of everywhere and nowhere: the parched heat of Basilicata, the corrugated cold of a Brooklyn winter, the damp grey of London. All of it threaded together by one insistent question — what does it mean to belong to a language you did not quite inherit?

Durastanti's parents are both deaf. Her father is American, her mother Italian from the impoverished south, and the marriage between them is volatile, tender, and resistant to easy interpretation. The child Claudia grows up in this hyphen — between languages, between nations, between the body's silence and the world's noise. La Straniera is her attempt to give that hyphen a name, a texture, a cultural history. What emerges is not a memoir in the conventional sense, with its comfortable arc of wound and recovery, but something more structurally restless: part autofiction, part cultural essay, part elegy. It refuses the safety of a single genre the way Durastanti has always refused the safety of a single country.

The book is organised into sections that do not so much advance chronologically as accrete — layering scenes from childhood over moments of adult clarity, allowing the past to leak into the present without ceremony. There is a deliberate asymmetry in this architecture. Some episodes are expanded into long, meditative paragraphs dense with observation; others are compressed into a single sharp sentence that arrives like a door closing. Durastanti understands that memory does not file itself neatly, and she trusts the reader to inhabit the resulting disorder. This is literary intelligence in its more demanding form: not the intelligence that explains, but the intelligence that withholds just enough to keep the reader alert.

Where the book achieves something genuinely remarkable is in its treatment of language in a multi-modal, often improvised linguistic environment — not as a given, but as a site of constant negotiation. Durastanti was raised in a household where communication is a hybrid of lip-reading, gestures and speech coexisting, often incompatibly, alongside spoken Italian and English. The result is a writer for whom language is never transparent, never merely instrumental. She came to written prose the way an immigrant comes to a new city — fluent enough to be functional, alert enough to notice what the natives take for granted. Her Italian has a slight foreignness even in its original form: sentences that sometimes reach for abstraction and land, instead, on something unexpectedly concrete; a rhythm that oscillates between the lyrical and the declarative as if two different speakers were sharing the same page. This duality translates into a prose that feels calibrated, slightly off-centre in the best possible way — never quite domesticated, never allowing comfort to settle for long. To read Durastanti on language is to understand that fluency is always, to some degree, performance, and that the gap between what you mean and what you can say is not a failure but a condition.

This condition — the constitutive gap, the structural foreignness — is what elevates La Straniera above the personal. Durastanti is writing about deafness and displacement, yes, but she is also writing about the broader experience of being formed at a border rather than within a centre. The Italian south she evokes is itself a kind of internal exile: Basilicata, one of the poorest and least-visited regions of the peninsula, appears in these pages as a landscape of dignified neglect, of people who have learned to expect little from the state and much from each other. The sections set there carry an anthropological attentiveness that never tips into condescension — Durastanti looks at her mother's origins with the mixed gaze of someone who has left but not forgotten, who has escaped but not escaped. This is a particular kind of double vision, and it is one of the book's recurring ethical achievements: the refusal to simplify the places that made you, even after you have moved beyond them.

Her portrait of her parents is equally resistant to simplification. Her father is a difficult figure — magnetic, erratic, capable of great warmth and careless damage. Her mother is fiercer, more opaque, a woman who built a life out of stubborn will rather than social scaffolding. Durastanti does not redeem them in the memoir's conventional register; she does not arrive at forgiveness as a narrative destination. Instead, she holds them in the ambiguity where they actually lived — two people who loved each other badly for many years, who gave their daughter the gift of dislocation, and who exist in these pages as both wound and inheritance.

There is a moment near the book's centre — I will not be more precise, because to locate it too exactly is to diminish its shock — where Durastanti reflects on what it means to translate your own family's silence into public language. To write about people who communicated in a visual, gestural register, and to render that communication in the linear architecture of prose, is itself a form of betrayal and a form of love. She holds both possibilities simultaneously, without flinching from either. It is the kind of moment that earns a book its place in the reader's long memory.

For me, reading La Straniera was not simply an act of literary appreciation. It was something closer to recognition — the mild vertigo of seeing your own experience refracted through someone else's formal choices. Like Durastanti, I grew up at the intersection of languages — Portuguese, the language of the coloniser I was by birth, and English, the language I came to inhabit by choice and affection, along with French and Spanish, and always the unnamed languages of displacement: the slight hesitation before I claim a fixed identity, the habit of observing places rather than assuming them. What Durastanti names as stranierità — foreignness, strangeness — I have come to think of as a kind of structural condition, a permanent marginality that is also, paradoxically, a kind of freedom. The person who belongs nowhere is also, in certain moments, the person who can belong anywhere, who carries their coordinates internally rather than externally. Durastanti does not romanticise this condition, and neither do I. But she understands it with a precision that feels, in the reading, like company.

Her cultural references are wide-ranging — American literature, Italian cinema, feminist theory, pop music — and she deploys them with the confidence of someone who has learned to build a home out of references precisely because no single geography could fully contain her. There is something almost curatorial in the way La Straniera assembles its intellectual furniture: it selects and arranges, gives each object its due weight, and then steps back to let the arrangement speak. Durastanti is not performing erudition; she is demonstrating how culture becomes, for the displaced person, a kind of portable architecture.

The book is not without its limits. Occasional passages slide into a self-consciousness that registers as effort rather than ease — moments where the essayistic voice overreaches, where the need to theorise slightly outpaces the material. And there are sections, particularly those involving Durastanti's later life in London, that feel less fully inhabited than the childhood scenes in Italy and New York, as if the adult's experience has not yet had time to become myth. These are minor reservations in a book of considerable ambition and sustained intelligence, but they are worth naming, because Durastanti herself names her contradictions honestly enough that the critic owes her the same honesty in return.

What lingers, finally, is not any single scene or sentence but a cumulative atmosphere: the sense of a writer who has found, in the act of writing, a country that no passport could have given her. La Straniera does not resolve the question of belonging — it complicates it, enriches it, and then leaves it open, as all serious questions must be left. The stranger, Durastanti suggests, is not someone who has failed to arrive; she is someone who has understood, more clearly than most, that arrival was never the point.

To read this book is to discover that the most precise maps are drawn from the inside of an absence.