Easy Motion Tourist a fast-paced and incredibly violent crime novel set in Lagos. A white male English journalist is sent to Nigeria to cover the presidential election but ends up stumbling on a gruesome crime scene, which gets him taken in by the police. He's rescued by a Nigerian woman who runs a safety organization for prostitutes, and the two of them together get caught up investigating what appears to be a crime ring involved in human sacrifice for ritual. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the resolution of some mysteries is saved for the sequel.
Given that it's a book by a Nigerian author, I found it somewhat surprising that, while the book contains many different threads, the white male journalist is the book's hero and the only first-person narrator. On the other hand, this did perhaps make it more accessible as a reader who has never visited Lagos – we see it through the eyes of a foreigner. Some things need to be explained to him, which helps the reader understand them too.
While the violence sometimes made it hard for me to read, the pace was just what I needed. I'm not yet sure if I'll seek out the sequel.
I read the latter two-thirds of Easy Motion Tourist while I was in Montreal for an extended Labor Day weekend. I was rushing a little to get through it, because I had a book club meeting less than a week after my return home and I had to start and finish that book as well. I was afraid if I took a break from Easy Motion Tourist it would just join the growing stack of books on my side table that I have started and not finished in 2023.
Strangers I Know is a work of autofiction, in which Durastanti tells stories of her family and her childhood, and her adulthood eventually, largely in the form of vignettes. The opening is incredible: she recounts, one after the other, the two conflicting stories of how her parents met, and then she tells us each of theirs histories, if briefly. I was immediately reminded of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, so of course I was prepared to love it. While it feels like it must have been an influence – the term "family lexicon" actually appears in the book on page 131 – it's not among the (extensive) list of books, movies, and music that she acknowledges as the things that "turn[ed her] into a character or a person."
Indeed, the similarities to Ginzburg diminish after the first section of the book. Durastanti is the child of deaf parents, who separated early in her life. She spent the first decade of her life in Brooklyn and reading about her experience living with her Italian family in Bensonhurst, during a period when I was also growing up in Brooklyn (8 years ahead of her by age) was both familiar and foreign (perhaps heightening the overarching feeling of the book for me, because it's entirely about that particular straddle.) After several years in Brooklyn, her mother moved back to Italy – to a village in Basilicata, where Durastanti spent her youth. The Basilicata connection was, I suppose, the second thing that disposed me to love this book – and she addresses the reader like me, who thinks first and foremost of Christ Stopped at Eboli when this region comes up. The village her mother lives in is evidently only 15 minutes from the Fossa del Bersagliere, which Levi wrote about and painted. But, she tells us, the youth of today's Basilicata live by the same rules as American teens. Of course they do: already in Levi's time there were Italians in Basilicata called "Americans" because they had emigrated and then returned. And that's exactly what Durastanti's family did, her grandmother and her mother both. I was so struck when I read Christ Stopped at Eboli to find that the immigration was not one-way only, and Strangers I Know just reinforced this fact for me. (I'm reminded also of a woman about my age who I know named Cinzia who was born in New Jersey, but has lives since early childhood in a town of less than 10,000 halfway between Matera and the Ioanian Sea.)
Despite (or maybe because of) my expectation to love Strangers I Know, I didn't. There were bits that I did love, but also stretches that felt naive when they seemed to intend to be profound. In the afterword, Durastanti says her intention was for the reader to be able to read this book's chapters (most of which are quite short) in any order, and it might be better consumed that way – picked up, read from a random point for 15 minutes or 30, and set back down until the mood struck again. I definitely would not say it's suited to reading for hours at a stretch, as I forced myself to do so I could finish it by 4pm today.
