Spatriati – Mario Desiati

[Other Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Italian by Michael F. Moore

On August 8, 1991, a horrific image reached the Italian shores, making waves across European media. An overwhelming mass of bodies clinging hungrily to the mast of a ship—the image of Vlora filled with Albanian immigrants arriving at Bari after the fall of the dictatorship. What these people found at the port was not hope but cops and soldiers pushing them back into the sea, prepared to watch them sink. Europe was just as callous about twenty years later, when Syrian immigrants poured into its borders. Spatriati, they would be called—all the desperate survivors and fighters, prepared to call themselves homeless for a chance at a better life.

Spatriato is the past participle of the Italian verb spatriare, or an adjective describing someone without a homeland, someone who leaves what is familiar to them. In Mario Desiati’s eleventh novel, a winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize, it is a synonym for the unwanted: “In some southern [Italian] dialects, including Martinese, it has other nuances, such as uncertain, disoriented, vagabond, scatterbrained, with neither art nor part, in some cases even an orphan.” Spatriati is the first of Desiati’s novels to be translated into English. Its translator, Michael Moore, is the former chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and well-known for his translations from Italian of influential writers like Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. Although fictional, Desiati’s narrative borrows some of the details from his personal experiences as a child in Puglia and living in Berlin later in life. Likewise, Spatriati follows Francesco’s life from his middle school years in late 80s and 90s Puglia, immigrating to Germany in his thirties and returning to Italy in present day.

The only good thing about living in the margins is finding others that have been cast there, too. For the protagonist Francesco, the “other” that made him feel less like one is his classmate Claudia, who unlike him, knows exactly what she wants. On the first page, Francesco remarks on his good fortune at having found his other half:

I never understood, of the two of us, which one was warm and which cold, but I consider myself lucky to have met my opposite front in Claudia Fanelli, the spatriata, 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.

Both characters cycle in and out of these epithets, carrying different facets of the word throughout their lives. Francesco and Claudia were spatriati even before uprooting, before immigrating, before change, both artefacts of a precarious generation. The narrative moves back and forth between these two characters. They exist as foils, the experiences and decisions of one influencing the other, sharing space on the page.

From the beginning, Francesco relates to “outsiders.” “Uva nero”—the black egg (perhaps black sheep would be a better translation)—his mother calls the boy for his dark skin unique among his family members. His queerness, too, is speculated and ridiculed in the paesino [small town] of Martina Franca. Throughout the novel Francesco wrestles with his desire for change and what he feels to be his duty, staying close to his roots.

We were hill people, we came from a land of bindweed and poppy, chickweed and chamomile, and especially of cyclamen, flowers whose roots are poisonous but supposedly protect you from evil spells. “Maybe they warn you of changes,” I said.

Although Francesco sees himself as foreign to this environment, where he is bullied and looked down on, leaving still feels like betrayal.

Claudia, on the other hand, defies the expectations of those around her, which is what makes her so intriguing to Francesco. She doesn’t try to “fit in,” despite being labeled “strange” in the same way Francesco is. In a fit against her father, she walks around town dressed like a man. Claudia has no need to lie or hide herself. One day she approaches Francesco with an earth-shattering truth: “My father is a surgeon at the hospital where your mother works, and now they’ve gone off to live together.” Their friendship starts as an alliance between wounded children and grows into a love unconstrained by conventional parameters. Lines are blurred; Francesco himself can’t seem to decide whether his desire is for her or her freedom.

Claudia embraces the name of spatriata. At seventeen, she escapes to London in an exchange program, leaving Francesco alone to wallow in melancholy. He is stuck between waiting for things to change but not willing to do anything to change them. In the meantime, he awaits Claudia’s calls. He is excited by her “richer, more colorful life,” perhaps dreaming of a similar one for himself. Claudia’s presence is like a window to a different world. More than that, she is the one that points out to him that there is a window—the veil of fog over his childhood along with the one over his future starts to lift, the window cracking open bit by bit.    

Despite their relationship and Francesco’s growing desire for change, he delays action. He chooses to stay in his home region of Puglia during university, then returns home to take over his father’s real estate business. Francesco lives in his father’s house. The only friends he has are people from his high school who, like him, never thought of venturing out of what is known. He even fosters the ambition of joining the ranks of priests, taken by appearances of goodness. Francesco’s desires are just as big as Claudia’s, yet he shields them from the real world because he has learned that there are consequences. When he considers traveling, it is always to be closer to Claudia.

She moves to Milan to study business at university and builds a life there, even if a different one than she imagined for herself. She is still dancing in abandoned warehouses turned clubs or reading southern Italian authors no one has ever heard of or speaking a dialect those around her don’t understand. She pushes through disappointment, keeps dancing even though Milan is not what she expected. She keeps reading through the job that bores her, and when she is presented with an opportunity, she takes it.

She only ever talked to me about her new city. Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. There she was free, she loved and got lost, worked and ate, failed and started all over again, without ever feeling like a nobody.

Her boldest move yet is moving to Berlin alone, with no one and nothing to hold onto but a job offer.

The whole novel is built through parallels between its main characters and the differences between where they place their hopes. Claudia finds solace in leaving, and Francesco does so by trying to renew his hope for his hometown. Claudia says she wants her independence, “I don’t want to be held hostage by anything,” but why should constantly uprooting one’s life be the only way to fulfillment? Her story will resonate with those who didn’t leave their old homes for financial stability, but to find a place that would welcome them. What both characters want is to find a home; for Claudia that means moving around Europe until somewhere feels right; for Francesco it ultimately means following the people that allow him to be himself. Because pain as his mother tells him one day is “never being able to be yourself your whole life long.”

When he finally decides to leave, he does so to follow Claudia, because she is someone who will let him leave without pain, and because he has accepted that this new place will give him others that will do the same: “For the first time I wanted to go away, not to change my life, but to add myself to the things that were happening to her.” He becomes friends with Claudia’s friends and takes on her past lovers; family ties are remade through love that defies taboos, not through blood. He finds people that he relates to and spaces where he finally does not need to hide. At the same time, he is unregistered, unemployed, and cannot receive benefits. Francesco erases the isolation that comes from “being different” from those around him, to now being labeled once again a spatriato, one now closer to the Syrians and Albanians—a useless member of society, a vagabond, a hooligan—and dumbfounded by his capacity to be both. Ultimately, he returns because the life he is building doesn’t seem to belong to him. He has reached out for Claudia, and he has grasped her life, has been assimilated into it, instead of creating a life of his own that includes her.

Although Francesco sides with these spatriati, the “dangerous” immigrants, their status is not the same. Through his Italian citizenship he can travel freely around Europe, even though he can’t freely express himself everywhere. The real distance even between “others” becomes clear through the introduction of characters that do have something to lose, whose status is not as stable and are always at risk of being sent back. Desiati addresses these differences and sheds light on immigration through short, focused moments throughout the novel. These fragments are largely focused on Andrea, an immigrant from Armenia whose EU visa expires, leading him to face deportation. Both Francesco and Andrea are queer men shunned by the communities they grew up in, brought together by their “foreignness” in a place that accepts what originally gave them the epithet of “other.” The difference between them is that Andrea’s position is far less secure—Francesco can choose to go back, Andrea’s conditions are determined by forces larger than him.

Today’s political conditions in Europe and beyond make stories centering on those living on the margins ever more pertinent. Desiati’s novel shows us acceptance and family can be found in the most unlikely places. Claudia and Francesco learn to let the world move them and then learn to bring their world with them, no matter the destination.

We sing songs and recite verses that are older than us, we are outside of time and have the illusion that we are safe.

Desiati gives the reader a world that is as cold as we know it to be, and yet, until the very end, offers connection as an alternative for warmth. The world is careless with the feelings of those who inhabit it, needing to keep moving. But sometimes one can feel the spinning slow down for them and their friend to sing songs and recite poems of another time—to feel safe, for a while.   

Arla Hoxha is a College of Letters student at Wesleyan University. She is interested in literary translation, and the intersection of precariousness and the everyday in fiction.