October 25, 2021
Durastanti's insightful and complex English-language debt examines a family's lifelong communication issues as its unnamed protagonist, an author and translator and 30-something daughter of two deaf Italian parents, explores the mysteries and myths of her life story. Her parents disagree on how they met, and divorce when the narrator is a young girl, causing her to split her childhood between Brooklyn, with her mother, and southern Italy, with her father. They don't teach her sign language, which makes communicating with them confusing or impossible, and her parents are often unstable (“It's easier to say my parents are deaf, more complicated to say they're mentally ill"). As a teen wandering down St. Marks Place, she discovers punk, prompting her to discard her “conformist magazines" and fall in love with the city's smell of “candy and garbage." In college, she aches for guidance but struggles with intimacy, convinced that “estrangement" and poor communication are normal in a relationship, while real love is a myth. The narrator also addresses her feelings on being an outsider as an immigrant, and not knowing which social class she fits into in the U.S. 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. Agent: Sandra Pareja, Massie & McQuilkin.
November 15, 2021
The daughter of two deaf parents explores her identity in a shape-shifting work straddling the boundaries of genre. Durastanti, a noted Italian writer born in Brooklyn, formulates her first novel as a series of autobiographical and philosophical vignettes organized by theme: Family, Travels, Health, Work & Money, Love, and What's Your Sign. The often whimsical subheadings include "The Girl Absent for Dizzy Spells" and "The Love That Would Not End for Another Eighteen Years, If It Ever Did, Began." While the beginning of the book focuses on her parents' origins and the final sections on her own experience of couple-hood as an adult, the book is resolutely nonlinear; the author confides in an afterword that she would have loved to have every copy printed with a different chapter sequence. "But is it a true story?" is a question first posed by the narrator's mother, who "hates fiction" and "believes The Exorcist is a realist masterpiece," and it returns repeatedly right up until the last sentence of the book. Who can say? "It takes only a little misstep to slip out of a novel, to fall into an autobiography and resurface again as an essay, all in the short span of a sentence." The author's parents are romantic characters given to extremes--they met the day her father tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere, or possibly the day he saved her mother from two thieves who were kicking her and trying to yank away her purse. Growing up in a chaotic, confusing family between Brooklyn and rural southern Italy, the author and her older brother, who were never taught sign language, bonded intensely. "When I'm asked who taught me to speak properly...I realize the first language I spoke was that of the first person I loved: the Italian of a boy six years my senior." Further guideposts and socialization were provided by literature, cinema, and music: Last Exit to Brooklynwas "the book that changed everything...revealing all my insides," while in her adolescence, R.E.M's Automatic For the People was an alternative to a social life: "For some reason, sinking into a dimension of held-in breath, potential euthanasia, and men on the moon was comforting." Fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk will enjoy this unusual work of personal mythology.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
December 1, 2021
In this exercise in autofiction, Italian author Durastanti's unnamed narrator writes about the experience of having two deaf parents who faced disability not with bravery or dignity but with recklessness and oblivion. Anything they touch, she adds, adapts to their decadence. When the narrator is six, her mother, who, like her father, never works, moves her from Brooklyn to a village in southern Italy. The girl returns to Brooklyn every summer and writes at length about her extended Italian American family and her own childhood, which she calls "humiliating" and "Dickensian." Nevertheless, she is able to go to college and then, at 27, move to London. Finding a partner, she 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.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.