Bøger af Claudia Durastanti

Prisvindende og anmelderrost familieportræt fra en af italiensk litteraturs nye store stjerner. Med udgangspunkt i sin egen ukonventionelle familie undersøger Claudia Durastanti de mytologier, der har formet hendes liv og gjort hende til den, hun er. Alle familier har deres egne mytologier, men i denne familie hænger historierne ikke sammen. Moren mor påstår, at hun mødte Claudias far, da hun reddede ham fra at springe ud fra en bro, mens faren påstår, de mødtes, da han reddede hende fra et røveri. Begge forældre er døve, men det er også det eneste, de har til fælles - og de lærer aldrig deres børn tegnsprog. Det er i dette konfliktfyldte miljø, at Claudia og hendes bror vokser op, i en verden præget misforståelser, frustration og stilhed. Fremmede jeg kender er en hybridroman om familie, opvækst og tilhørsforhold, der på forunderligvis fusionerer udviklingsromanen med memoirer og essayformen, en bog i konstant bevægelse og en udforskning af, hvordan sproget former vores identitet og gør os til dem, vi er.

Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia's mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different; they can't even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common - their parents have not bothered to teach them - family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she's not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock - and a tumultuous relationship - begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life. Kinetic, formally daring, and strikingly original, Strangers I Know is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

"Durastanti casts the universal drama of the family as the sieve through which the self—woman, artist, daughter—is filtered and known." —Ocean Vuong A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life.Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations, by turns hilarious and devastating. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock—and a tumultuous relationship—begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life. Kinetic, formally dazzling, and spectacularly original, this book is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

In Caterina, Claudia Durastanti presents us with a Cleopatra for our times - no exotic queen courted by two lovers with the fate of an empire in their hands but a young would-be ballet dancer who now works in as a cleaner in a down-at-heel hotel. This is the Rome of the underclass, of illegal immigrants, gypsies and sex shops where life is a struggle for dysfunctional families and nothing comes easy, except disappointment. Every Thursday Caterina visits her boyfriend Aurelio in Rebibbia prison in Rome, where, following a mysterious tip-off to the police, he is being held in custody under suspicion of pimping the strippers in the nightclub he was running. What would Aurelio say if he knew that she went straight from the prison to meet the policeman who arrested him, and who is now her lover? Caterina's life is difficult and her environment challenging but she is a survivor and takes everything life throws at her without complaint. Caterina is very much a heroine for our times.