There is a growing appetite for stories from around the globe, but only if they avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes an 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.
Its breathtaking limestone canyons and ancient Greek temples notwithstanding, the region offers little in terms of recognisable, picturesque Italianness – the Tuscan hills, Venetian canals and clothesline-strewn Neapolitan alleys which, I felt, Italian novels were often expected to offer if they wanted to appeal to an international audience. Strangers I Know seemed poised to broaden the range of what we understand as an Italian story – because it was also an American one, and because it eschewed all stereotypes about Italy.
Not for long. After a pilot was written and slated for production, the broadcaster asked for a rewrite. The Italian backdrop, they said, was too unfamiliar. Why not set it in Ireland? It would be easier for audiences to relate to, and in its crucial aspects (Catholic, poor) it was kind of the same. The project was ultimately shelved.
