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.
The history of the novel is deeply entwined with European nationalisms and national identities. Walter Scott’s historical novels drew from (and consolidated) Scotland’s history into a shared mythology; Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed is still studied in Italian schools as the crucible that forged a unified language from a plethora of local variants; Goethe, Austen, Dostoevsky and Balzac all captured what they felt was the nature of a specific place and time, offering nations a mirror in which to see or imagine their national ethos.
As books were translated and read across borders, a slightly paradoxical notion of two-layered reading emerged: novels offered, on the one hand, a very precise depiction of a specific place and time and national spirit; but through the specifics, something general could be glimpsed outside the national confines – about what it feels like to be a person, which to me sounds like a serviceable approximation of what the art of the novel is about. This gave rise to an idea of literature as a kind of exchange or conversation between national literatures, each with their allotted seats at the canon – Fernando Pessoa or Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen or Émile Zola: of course, they were almost exclusively male seats.
The imperialistic premise in this idea of literature as an egalitarian conversation between national traditions is blatant: as Milan Kundera remarked, what it took for a country to be awarded its own national literature – instead of being grouped into an ill-assorted umbrella term such as “Mitteleuropa” – was a colonial past. And yet that was still the way literature was taught and read, in Italy, until a couple of decades ago. We read Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. We read Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. We read Thomas Mann and Ernesto Sábato.
And then we didn’t. The consolidation of the English-language publishing industry in the 1980s and 90s gave its most successful writers a worldwide reach and a critical impact that no authors from other countries could aspire to. The Italian contemporary canon, at the beginning of the millennium, was composed of David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen; the country’s first creative writing programme, established in the mid-90s, owes its name to Holden Caulfield; its students (some of whom have been my students) learn technique by reading Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, who show; not Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante, who tell. Their Italian syntax and style – as measured in Eleonora Gallitelli’s groundbreaking computational studies – are more influenced by English than the Italian of translators working from English.
This didn’t happen only in Europe. As discussed in Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English – an essayistic memoir about the author’s having to choose between being an American and a Japanese writer, and choosing the latter, and regretting it – at the turn of the millennium the idea of national literatures, modelled as a system of literary discourses on a somewhat equal footing, no longer held. Instead, we moved into a world in which one of those traditions had expanded beyond the national, becoming de facto universal.
There is nothing intrinsically lamentable about this, which can be seen as a way out of nationalisms. But there can be only one universal; and as the anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local. In a system in which English-language literature deals transnationally with general issues, the specifics that had characterised national literatures (Austen’s England, Dostoevsky’s Russia) lose their role and become local colour, picturesque. When a story has universal ambitions, such as Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, it thus makes sense to recast it someplace more relatable, in a setting where the exoticism won’t get in the way.
Something similar happened to me. Years ago, a German publisher declined to translate my second novel – a story of ambition and financial speculation – because the Italian backdrop might have confused a German readership used to imagining corporate raiders in New York, or perhaps in Frankfurt. But, he said, the chapters in which the protagonist visited his father in Venice were great, so poetic. Had I considered setting a book in Venice? Italy, for him, had ceased to be seen as a legitimate context for corporate ambition, as it was in Paolo Volponi’s Le Mosche del Capitale, and become a set of exotic backdrops: Naples, Puglia, Rome, the Tuscan hills, or Venice.
This, in a way, is a division of labour: a way the international market for literature has tried to become more efficient by allocating the general discourse to a set of mostly English-speaking writers, while a peripheral circle of local colleagues are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza.
But the landscape described by Mizumura has drastically rearranged itself over the past few years, and the primacy of anglophone literature seems to have faded. The authors in today’s contemporary canon – celebrated by critics worldwide, and imitated by aspiring novelists – come from much more varied backgrounds and write in many more languages. Roberto Bolaño, Annie Ernaux, Han Kang and Karl Ove Knausgård are the Franzens and Wallaces of two decades ago.
Of course it is impossible to draw a precise line for a general shift of this kind, but “Ferrante fever” could be as good a watershed moment as any. Elena Ferrante was a relatively niche writer (both in her country and abroad) whose novels achieved a spectacular, worldwide success, reaching the kind of ubiquity previously associated with people performatively reading Infinite Jest to show off. It also sparked a growing international interest in Italian literature, involving both younger writers (such as Durastanti, or myself for that matter) or allegedly “forgotten” classics, such as the works of Elsa Morante and Alba de Céspedes.
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There could be several reasons for this. The further consolidation of the US publishing industry has made it harder for innovative, ambitious novels to emerge. It could be an effect of the trendiness of “literature in translation” in the English-language market – even though the notion that it would have its own niche is largely unfathomable to non-native English speakers, used since childhood to reading literature in translation and calling it “literature”.
It could also be that different books are being written. Since the turn of the century, writers from all over the world have felt the dual literary citizenship that Minae wrote about: seeing themselves as part of both a local and a universal tradition, reading Anna Maria Ortese at the Scuola Holden. It would have been natural to try to combine the two, working into their writing a thin veneer of exoticism to lead readers to engage with its deeper ideas.
Of course there is much, much more to, say, Ferrante’s novels than a picturesque Italian backdrop. But the backdrop’s recognisability – indeed, its very picturesqueness – has probably played a role in making them relatable to a wider audience. Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives similarly toys with cliches about Mexico, both subverting them and contextualising them into a wider picture. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian plays into a strain of body horror that western readers have come to stereotypically associate with east Asian literature – only to explode it with a psychologically harrowing and politically powerful fable about resisting patriarchy.
On the other hand, this increased international interest in non-anglophone literature could have another source: no matter where these books originated, their worldwide success often came as a result of their success in English. This was the case with, for instance, both Ferrante and Bolaño, who only caught on abroad after resonating with the English‑language market.
It is particularly evident in Han’s case: The Vegetarian was published in South Korea in 2007, but gained international acclaim after Deborah Smith’s spectacularly successful translation was published almost a decade later. In a particularly significant twist, its Italian edition was translated from the English instead of Han’s Korean, not because no translators could be found but because the editor, who read it in English, found Smith’s prose more effective – more relatable? – than the renditions they initially commissioned from the original.
This is not limited to recent, successful novels: two canonical 20th-century Italian authors, Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes, have been translated internationally mostly after their English editions. Conversely, classic Danish author Tove Ditlevsen’s trilogy appeared in Italian after its US translation. If anglophone culture no longer beams its literature from the centre to what Umberto Eco called “the peripheries of the Empire”, it still acts as a transit hub between them, the arbiter of what is allowed to go beyond the confines of the local. My own novel, Perfection, has been acquired for translation in languages from Thai to Lithuanian only after its reception in English, and its International Booker shortlisting.
This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism; and yet it also allows more room for agency. Our peripheries are closer to each other than the long way through the centre makes it seem: readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen’s Minnesota.
Durastanti’s latest novel, Missitalia, has a section set in Basilicata, mixing the true story of the women-only gangs that haunted its forests in the 19th century with the parallel-history discovery of oil there. As it is currently being translated into 10 languages (including English), she recently told me that her translators sometimes reach out to ask for help in rendering the region’s atmosphere. “Just think Appalachia,” is an answer she gives.
