It has been a long time since we heard such a powerful voice on disability. Whether the book is memoir, biography, or invented novel hardly matters. In The Foreigner (La nave di Teseo, 2019, 285 pages, €18), a finalist for the Strega Prize, writer and translator Claudia Durastanti (born 1984) reconstructs her story as a "reverse immigrant"—born in Brooklyn, transplanted at six to a small town in Basilicata "where there were more cattle than people," university in Rome, adult life in London. Daughter of two deaf parents ("He had spent his whole life searching for someone like himself. Not someone who faced disability with courage or dignity, but with recklessness"), the protagonist is buffeted and shaken, sometimes stunned, yet never truly lost. She knows how to plant seeds even as she finds herself—or feels herself, depending on one's perspective—uprooted from places, times, and situations. "I tell my parents' story to the niece of the woman who jumped from the Arc de Triomphe. I explain that they never wanted to accept being deaf, never wanted to surrender to that limit. She asks: 'But why should they have?' Not because they were deaf, but because they were young: no one should limit their desire to be something else." And if it has indeed been a long time since we heard so powerful a voice on disability, it is also because—in the end—Claudia Durastanti hits the mark while somehow bypassing it altogether.
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