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.
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.
