Ariadne's Thread: Untangling Identity in Claudia Durastanti's Strangers I Know Through the Conflation of Tenderness and Animality, Love and Violence, and Supernatural Beings as a Motif for Transformation

At its core, Strangers I Know is a novel about the narrator's search for a sense of identity and belonging while she is constantly in the center of the divide between two parents, countries, cultures, languages, being suspended between conformity and nonconformity, and hearing and nonhearing society. In the narrator's, Claudia's, search, she untangles all of this by recounting stories from her life; like an endless hall of mirrors, flipping through these anarchic pages of her soul can feel disorienting. However, author Claudia Durastanti establishes an overarching sense of cyclicality and interconnectivity throughout the novel which indicates that, even in the profound dichotomy that defines the narrator's life, there is a sense of continuity that can be traced through the map of her history.

Tenderness and Animality

Throughout the novel, the concepts of violence and animality are continually related to the concepts of tenderness and intimacy with metaphors and symbolism. Relating her parents' relationship to the roles of prey and predator, Claudia says, with the use of an extended simile, that her father would “find [Claudia's mother] like a wounded, bleeding hunter looking for his prey, when he has no other senses to rely on and must trust his own raging instincts” (Durastanti 6). Near the end of the novel, when Claudia finds her own love, she connects this same concept of animality to her relationship. While describing one of the heights of their symbiosis during a vacation, she utilizes the metaphor that “for once we were silent, synchronized, animals” (Durastanti 266). This mention of animals and instincts in relation to loving partnerships in this way is relatively unconventional, and the way in which Claudia approaches this with metaphor and simile seems deliberate. This alludes to the idea that, in Claudia's mind, human relationships are, on some level, animalistic and instinctual.

Glass Shards as Absolution

Claudia does not only relate tenderness to animalism, but she relates love with violence in both her description of her parents' relationship during her childhood, and her own relationship in her adult life. From the beginning, Claudia's parents' most intimate, loving moments are accompanied by some kind of violence or danger. Months after her father crashed his car into a brick wall, he insisted there were still glass shards in his head that Claudia's mother carefully attempted to remove repeatedly. Though when speaking of this, her mother insists that she never loved Claudia's father and “There’s no love between deaf people—it’s a fantasy of the hearing,” Claudia says her mother did this for years, "trying to make up for an accident. Those shards didn't exist, and they both knew it" (Durastanti, 51).

She previously, metaphorically, described her parents' relationship as “punctuated with cheerful conversations that before she knew it had turned to glass shards spread across the floor" (Durastanti 39). The shards in her father's head were not literal or tangible, but they weren't exactly fake, either. This ritual her parents practiced acted as an expression of some kind of absolution between them. Despite the symbolic "glass shards" that remained scattered in their relationship, her mother nevertheless took the time to remove them from Claudia's father's head—the combination of Claudia's father asking for help and her mother willing to assist was an expression of love, regardless of how much her mother denies it.

Danger and Intimacy

The sense of danger and intimacy are closely connected in Claudia's mind, likely deriving from her parents, and she relates this to her own relationship in adulthood. She antithetically describes the "tender violence" she enjoys in her partner's illness. Every time he is sick, her “blood blazes and [she feels] revived, energized… [She's] endlessly pleased when he’s helpless” (Durastanti 265). This emphatically descriptive parallel between her parents' intimacy borne of violence and her own intimacy borne of sickness, though she describes it as violence, connects these two concepts not only in the reader's mind, but Claudia's as well.

As a child, Claudia saw how her parents expressed their love: animalistically and violently; some sense of danger was involved in their most intimate moments. As an adult, Claudia mirrors this behavior in her own relationships, though thankfully on a smaller scale. The use of metaphors, similes, and symbolism sustain these themes of animalism and violence in connection to love and tenderness which contribute a wealth of insight into Claudia's development. By being able to trace cause-and-effect in Claudia's life among the chaotic, fast-paced experiences she describes in the narrative, a sense of interconnectivity is created, and Claudia's character is able to be understood more deeply.

Supernatural Creatures and Transformation in Identity

Correlative mentions of supernatural entities at the beginning and end of the book coincide with the recurrent theme of transformations in identity. This frequent reference to the supernatural connects Claudia's childhood preoccupation with imagined supernatural transformations of those around her to the penultimate chapter, where her dream and its relation to the supernatural signifies her perception of her own transformation, and perhaps her own personal monster.

Childhood Monsters and Identity Impermanence

In her childhood, Claudia had a profound fascination with the supernatural. With the seeds planted by her superstitious family in Southern Italy who warned her of a local "man who was sometimes a werewolf," she later says that she'd "almost [hope] he'd come creeping down along the wall and bare his yellow fangs" (Durastanti 81, 114). While her family was warning her of werewolves she secretly wished to meet, Claudia was fixated on Twin Peaks and grew up with the idea that, like the local werewolf, "if we weren't careful, even a father could turn into something else, like Laura Palmer's father, like my father" (Durastanti 81). In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer's father had been possessed by an interdimensional entity who had been sexually abusing Laura until he murdered her. This morbid consideration, and possible fascination with, the idea of a local man and her own father being capable of such grotesque things portray the unnaturally extreme lack of permanence regarding identity—even of those closest to her—Claudia possessed as a child; her mind was frantically trying to make sense of the world around her.

Vampires, Werewolves, and a Search for Identity in Adulthood

This search for stability and belonging continues throughout the book, but the supernatural does not return until Claudia is an adult. This time, it's in her dreams, the monster is her, and she is "like the scary creatures from when [she] was a child" (Durastanti 277). In this dream rooted in ghouls from her childhood, she merges with her victim—who is most likely her current lover—until they become physically one with each other. Not only has she become something other than herself, like the local man and her father in her childhood imagination, but she is imposing this act on another. The consideration of the impermanence of identity has shifted from those around her, whose identities Claudia now has a stable sense of, to Claudia's own identity, which remains amorphous to her.

It has also shifted to the possibility of this change being an act she's inflicted on another person in the "greatest act of violence [she's] ever committed against another" being "turning him into someone like [her]", just as it had been done to her by her parents, whose "power[s] lie in persuading any creature within reach to come undone, to slip into [their] potential madness" (Durastanti 277, 53-54). She dreams of herself repeating this cycle by persuading her partner to slip into her 'potential madness,' as her parents had done to her, and others, in her past.

She compares her actions in her dream to vampires and werewolves, who not only transform themselves, but possess the ability to transform another into something like themselves. She states that "anyone who has met a vampire or werewolf" knows that they don't "go out only in search of victims;" their (and her) violence is more meaningful than that because their victims must live and coexist with what is taken from them, and this is irreversible (Durastanti 278). This could represent not a literal event of her changing her lover's identity in some way, but perhaps her fear of doing so, as her parents did to her.

Belonging in Transformation

The recurrent comparison to supernatural creatures connects Claudia's initial childhood occupation with the supernatural to her final dream about them, both of which deal with themes of the changeability of identity and Claudia's perception of them which reveals her character development in the novel. Perhaps her dream also reflects her realization that she is not just one 'self', but many over time that wax and wane with each experience. The fluctuation and irregularity that comes with such a volatile and varied childhood results in a deeper understanding of identity as not one thing, but a complex, nebulous thing. Though a sense of belonging will be harder to find with this ever-present knowledge of and experience with the mutability of identity, it is possible she finds her belonging in the transformative natures of the monsters in adulthood tracing all the way back to her childhood.

Ariadne's Thread

Despite the seemingly chaotic narrative structure and content of Strangers I Know, from the timeline both within and between chapters, to Claudia bouncing between Italy and America, father and mother, and the deaf and hearing, Claudia Durastanti balances this with myriad recurring symbols, metaphors, themes, phrases, and motifs that are scattered throughout the novel. The parallels created between intimacy and danger and animalism using metaphors and symbolism reveal parallels between her parents' relationship and her own adult relationship, the possibility that Claudia is repeating her parents behaviors, and Claudia's consequently unconventional attitude towards love. The mention of supernatural creatures in Claudia's childhood demonstrate her struggle with understanding the identities of others, and their mention in her dream in adulthood demonstrate her continuous struggle with her own identity, and perhaps a realization that identity is ever-changing, and will never be permanent. These devices act as footholds that create a continuous sense of association between chapters, and conjoin related events in Claudia's life, which add depth to the narrative and strengthen Claudia's characterization, even in the absence of her own unstable sense of identity.