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[.]
