‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal
There’s a growing appetite for stories from around the globe – if only we can avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes the International Booker nominee
When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti’s book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.
A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country’s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy’s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi’s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region’s border: Basilicata was never saved.
