Spatriati – Mario Desiati

[Other Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Italian by Michael F. Moore

When Francesco Veleno finds out his mother is having an affair, he sees it for what it is: a betrayal. But with Claudia Fanelli’s help, he also sees what it could be: permission to live a different kind of life than the one permitted in the southern Italian town of Martina Franca in 1999, one in which he is allowed to choose himself and his happiness. But joyful emancipation is not Francesco’s natural state. A passive and awkward teenager, he is used to performing the same tasks, rituals, and games—taking part in church processions and masturbating on the couch. Francesco leans away from change, even as he longs for what it might yield.

Enter Claudia, Francesco’s quirky classmate and the daughter of the man with whom his mother has fallen in love. Claudia isn’t afraid to be different and doesn’t crave social approval. She dresses like a man in her father’s tie and quotes poetry in response to direct questions. Claudia approaches Francesco in order to understand her father’s choice (“What are your mother’s tits like?”), but also because she understands Francesco—whom she calls “Frank”—as her natural ally, the unfortunate collateral damage of parental infidelity.

Together they are spatriètə, as some say in Martina Franca’s local dialect, “the name people around here use for the uncertain, the odd, the unclassifiable and sometimes the shiftless or orphans, as well as unmarried men or women, vagrants and vagabonds, or even in the case that concerns us, the emancipated.” Two misfits, squirming to envision, perhaps even create, the possibility of belonging—whether in Martina Franca or in exciting new worlds. Francesco swears he’s in love with her; Claudia wants a friend for life.

Desiati’s novel Spatriati, which won Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize in 2022 (did you know winners actually receive a bottle of Strega liqueur?), follows Francesco and Claudia’s friendship across many years, from their late adolescence in 1999 into their solid adulthood in 2019. More specifically, we follow Francesco’s view of their relationship, and because of this the story balances on a knife’s edge of uncertainty. While Claudia leaves town and takes risks, Francesco recounts her choices with anxiety, especially if they take her away from him. He makes his own choices, for the most part, along lines of convenience, safe but unsatisfying, remaining in Martina Franca for the majority of the book. The novel’s experienced translator, Michael F. Moore, has rendered several stories from Italian that follow the stumbling coming-of-age journeys of their young protagonists. Not limited to any particular era or region, Moore’s backlist seems to orbit the initiatory clashes between young people and the worlds—the Italys—they inherit. Here, he lends his English to Francesco’s angst and Claudia’s rebellion with the compassion of a parent who wants to support you without you knowing it, hiding in the bleachers at the JV soccer game with a silent smile.

Francesco’s narration lacks urgency (that’s Claudia’s modus operandi, not his), which makes for a curious reading. His experience of his friendship with Claudia (not even the friendship itself) represents the beating heart of the story, which means other aspects and plot points become simply circumstantial. Some years of their lives receive ample investigation, while others fly by without much comment. Their various jobs are spoken about but add little to their journeys of self-development. It is mentioned that they have other friends and acquaintances, but these connections are weak and unarticulated. Claudia’s mother makes an outrageous move, marrying the man who almost killed her daughter, and Francesco is threatened by the mafia, but these startling events are no more than blips on the landscapes of their adult lives. I can’t help but wonder if the novel, narrated from Claudia’s perspective, might have been more focused, more arresting for its readers.

Francesco and Claudia’s story continues just as it began, pursuing the kernel of freedom within transgression. In the early stages, at the beginning of their friendship, they learn the risks of transgressing. After Francesco finds himself sharing an intimate kiss with Domenico, a peer at his church, he experiences the vitriol of rumors meant to save Domenico’s face at his expense. “I worried how rumors like that in town meant a death sentence, I could never set foot in the parish again without someone pushing me and tugging on my right ear shouting, ‘Faggot.’” Only referenced a couple times in the text, Francesco’s experiences of abuse at the hands of priests lurks under the surface of his sexual awareness. While Francesco references such encounters offhandedly, or even with a sense of familiar nostalgia, it’s no wonder that he is ambivalent toward the transgression Claudia so readily embraces. Perhaps he recognizes, though without clear articulation, that next to the kernel of freedom within transgression lies one of violence.

Claudia is not spared such violence for long. Her relationship with a man thirty years older than her ends when he tries to strangle her to death on the beach. Their experiments to know themselves come up against the common enemy of patriarchal violence, making their bond even more necessary, an oasis of understanding and solidarity. Freed from the imposing moral high ground of (and by) their parents, yet still bound by the hierarchies of their hometown, this pair transgresses into territories of dangerous intimacy, ones that they can only process with each other.

Spatriati takes place across several cities of Europe, beginning with Martina Franca in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot. Claudia escapes first to London for her junior year of high school, then Milan for university, and finally Berlin in her adulthood, gaining access to Berghain and the KitKatClub. There is a clear construction of center-periphery within the European Union, which Claudia and Francesco’s generation contends with. Southern Italy constitutes the periphery, a home to “the cruel law of keeping up appearances,” which condemned his parents to the performance of an intact marriage even as his mother defected over weekends of infidelity. The great cities of the European center—Milan, London, Berlin—are seen as welcoming of marginality, bastions of techno and liberating anonymity, places where people “don’t have to answer to anyone for who they are.” Claudia and Francesco embody this Gen X coming of age, which took to trains, with or without documentation, to explore an interconnected continent.

Eventually, Claudia convinces Frank to join her in Berlin. She takes him on an erotic pilgrimage to clubs, and while he relishes in the opportunity to finally touch her, she invites him into erotic play not necessarily to connect with him sexually, but rather to demonstrate the existence of a world full of possibilities, and the version of himself that world may allow him to be. Together they reach for a kind of erotic liberation, not with each other (usually), but inspired by one another: “I was on the verge of understanding that my truth was the deeply masculine something in Claudia and the deeply feminine something in the men who awakened my desire.” The inspiration is imbalanced, however, because it is mostly Claudia who inspires Francesco, attempting to push him toward the truths he is unwilling to admit to himself, the parts of himself he’s unwilling to explore. Perhaps he serves as her only remaining connection to her former home, their friendship proof that she doesn’t want to let everything from her past go if she doesn’t have to.

In Berlin, Claudia has had several relationships, including a romantic relationship with a woman, Erika, and a mostly-platonic partnership with a gay Georgian man, Andria. After Claudia and Andria separate, she gives Francesco her blessing to ask Andria out. What follows is perhaps Francesco’s first real romantic relationship, and his second true love, after Claudia. “Like me, Andria had also come to Berlin in search of a place where he could love, in pursuit of a yearning that had lived inside him for decades.” Unfortunately, Andria, living on an expired visa, returns abruptly to Georgia, leaving the European Union for the foreseeable future.

Francesco attributes this move to material conditions of emigrating from the periphery: “People who come from there stay with us just long enough to realize that they will always have borders to honor.” Yet he also shares a sense of nostalgic complicity with Andria, a longing to return to the land and practices they felt forced to leave behind. Threading a sense of complicity between their Georgian and southern Italian homelands, they share muscle memories of rural life beyond the reach of the urban European center. The two share a coming of age composed of learning to make wine, though with different grapes: “At any moment I half expected him to pull out a pair of scissors like my grandfather had, I would have shown him how I severed the bunches of verdeca grapes, which are as tiny as fish eyes.” In the end, thanks to an admittedly uninspiring turn of events (his father confronts a thief who stole his mother’s car years ago), Francesco returns home, rejoining the processions of his local parish, taking over his grandparents’ plot of land and tending their young olive grove.

“This new life resembles in its way the life I had in Berlin with Claudia when we tended the food of others. Today I whitewash the stones with lime and nourish the earth with fertilizer,” he says. The story ends with Claudia’s visit, potentially the last, to Martina Franca to visit Frank. They read poetry together under a pergola. While for Claudia escape proves not only necessary but core to her being, we are left with the sense that Francesco would have preferred a life where escape was not necessary, where he could have come to know himself without uprooting himself in the process.

What I love about so many novels of modern and contemporary Italian literature, often narrated in first person, is that they are firmly rooted in the interiority of the protagonist, and yet they deal with such interiority concretely, as a material reality (see de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook or Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito). They commit to subjectivity but treat that subjectivity as palpable, even as fact—because for the characters, it is. As much as we may attempt to extrapolate toward an objective or omniscient view, all we have is the all-consuming reality of our experiences and our interpretations of them. Rather than a subjectivity that convinces us of an untrue certainty, many Italian novels present a subjectivity that is matter-of-fact in its absurdity and uncertainty—a commitment to inquiry and observation that is unyielding almost to the point of neurosis.

Spatriati launches readers into the insecure and meandering interiority of Francesco, who never stops pining over Claudia, even though his love for her defies all classifications of the erotic, romantic, platonic, and familial. I recognize some elements of my own friendships in theirs: the bewildering intimacy felt with friends who witness parts of me I struggle to see myself, the estrangement that comes when such intimacy is interrupted by the mundane demands of life and the ebbs and flows of communication. Their connection is admirable when they are well-attuned to each other, frustrating when they fall out of step, but all of these phases make up the constant departing and returning that marks a lifelong friendship.

Ultimately, the novel is faithful to its epigram, a quote by Giacomo Leopardi: “Never content, never centered . . .” At times liberating and relatable in its endless yearning, at times wandering too far afield to hold one’s attention, Spatriati eschews readers’ expectations, as life often does to those of us who think we are owed certainty and purpose.

Liliana Torpey is a writer from Oakland, California. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, focusing on poetry and literary translation. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, NACLA, and Euronews Culture.