For the new 2023 edition of the Book Club promoted by the EUNIC cultural bodies in Ireland, the Italian Institute of Culture will host live the young author Claudia Durastanti interviewed by the Irish writer Catherine Dunne.
Together they will discuss the book “La Straniera” (La Nave di Teseo, 2019) published in English with the title “Strangers I know” by the Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The meeting, in English, is the first of the EUNIC European Book Club 2023 series which will see 9 European authors from 9 different countries interviewed by authors, critics and academics in Ireland. Discover the program of all the events of the EUNIC European Book Club 2023 on the FB profile of EUNIC Ireland.
Free admission.
EUNIC is the European Union National Institutes of Culture network that brings together 18 members from EU countries in Ireland.
CLAUDIA DURASTANTI
Claudia is a writer and translator. His debut novel “Un giorno verrò a lancia sassi alla tua finestra” (Marsilio, 2010) won the Mondello Giovani Prize. He has also published “A Chloe, per le motivi sbagliate” (Marsilio, 2013), “Cleopatra va in carcere” (Minimum Fax, 2016) and “La straniera” (La nave di Teseo, 2019). She was Italian Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is one of the founders of the Italian Festival of Literature in London.
THE BOOK: “Strangers I know”
Synopsis: “A family story looks more like a topographical map than a novel, and a biography is the sum of all the geological eras you’ve gone through.” How do you tell a life if not exploring the symbolic and geographical places, reconstructing a map of oneself and the world lived? Between Basilicata and Brooklyn, from Rome to London, from childhood to the future, the new book by the author of “Cleopatra va in carcere” is an adventure that combines old and new migrations. Daughter of two deaf parents who oppose the sense of isolation with a passionate and angry relationship, emigrated to a Lucanian village from New York as a child to return periodically, the protagonist of “Strangers I know” lives a feverish childhood, fragile yet capable, like a stubborn plant, of generating roots everywhere. The child who has become an adult does not stop drawing new migratory routes: for study, for emancipation, for irremediable love. By intention or destiny, it searches memory and indulges its landslides and darkness.
Not only memoir, not only novel, in this book with a mobile definition as a landscape and with a language so broad as to contain geography and time, Claudia Durastanti investigates always feeling foreign and ubiquitous.
“Strangers I know” is the story of a contemporary sentimental education, disoriented by a magnetic and irrepressible past, by the knowledge of physical diversity and irreducible social distinctions, and shows that the story of a family, its voices and its trajectories, is first of all a story of the body and words, in which, at a certain point, Measuring the distance to home becomes impossible.
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