Strangers I Know is nonlinear, not chronological and without plot. This resistance to categorization allows Durastanti to write about her parents, languages, and migrations, moving from one theme to another sometimes in the span of a paragraph. Holding this movement together is the narrator Claudia’s unrelenting inquiry into how a self is formed ... the language in Strangers I Know, wonderfully translated by Elizabeth Harris, is precise ... Strangers I Know is a flame held up to the inexpressible self.
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 ... Durastanti’s tutor at college coined the term 'finction' to 'define something that wasn’t false but built up,' and finction is a good enough description of this extraordinary book ... The neatness of the book’s structure barely contains the excess of the content: the problem of genre, the glamour 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 ... Durastanti’s self-mythologies strike an uncomfortable note ... Ill at ease in a real-life story, she would sooner be a character in a novel.
It’s from this impasse—two adamant perspectives of reality, that the narrator comes into being, always between two nodes of truth ... Jumping back and forth between these two alleged origins, finally, the narrator’s own truth emerges ... The summation of a life cannot merely be relegated to familial origins, though, as Strangers I Know aims to show. Durastanti’s narrator probes at the very idea that life itself cannot be captured fully—even in the pages of a book. For all the narrator does by hurtling against time, fighting back against the gravitational pull of her family’s legacy, and the trauma carried forward into their future but also her own future. For all the ways she strikes out and makes this life of hers her very own, a grim and sardonic rhetoric emerges towards the end of the book[.]
This heterodox book breaks many literary conventions, making it occasionally hard to follow. Orthodoxy, unlike it was for William Warburton, isn’t my doxy, but this heterodoxy can get confusing and sometimes paradoxical ... Many of the...essays, seeped in emotion, are nicely written ... Reading the book (regardless of whether the text shape-shifts) has an emotionally hypnotic effect, and despite its starts and stops, its digressions and regressions, it hardly matters whether it is a true story, as Claudia’s mother would have it.
A bold, maze-like work of autofiction, memoir and reflections ... Durastanti looks unflinchingly at family bonds and their legacy in the individual ... In this moving family portrait she depicts personal calamities and failings with frankness, but the glimpses of violence and loneliness throughout shimmer with a sense of acceptance and the 'useless power of forgiveness'.
Finding a partner, [Durastanti] writes thoughtfully about love and relationships and her fear that she might discover that alone, she would actually survive just fine. And the same seems to be true about writing, which is something, she asserts, that you can give up and then walk away from. Although sometimes slow paced, this novel-as-memoir is insightful and thought provoking.
... insightful and complex ... While some of the narrative can feel jumbled, Durastanti offers profound insights and can capture moments of beauty. This makes for an enjoyable and distinctive bildungsroman.
