Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
One of the first novels to explore Italian American women's experience and an acknowledged contemporary classic of Italian American literature, Umbertina tells the richly detailed story of four generations of women. The novel follows Umbertina and her descendants from her roots in a Calabrian village through a period of American assimilation, to Umbertina's great-granddaughters' efforts to resolve the dilemma of their Italian American identity. When first published in 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "an important novel for these times. . . . Through a dazzling interplay of American and Italian characters in both countries, Helen Barolini delineates the major concerns of all thinking American ethnics." This is no less true today, as this republication restores Umbertina to a reading public newly attuned to the complexities of cultural inheritance and identity.Editorials
Library Journal
LJ's reviewer found this first novel a tad long but nonetheless "readable, perceptive, and rich in detail" (LJ 10/15/79). It tells the story of four generations of women, beginning in Italy in the 1860s and ending in the United States in the 1960s. This edition includes a scholarly afterword.Book Details
Published
September 1, 1985
Publisher
Bantam Books
Pages
448
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780553138177