Umbertina belongs to the tradition that has recently produced such works as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo, Joanna Kadi’s Thinking Class, Kim Chernin’s In My Mother’s House, and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. These memoirs and autobiographical novels are, like Umbertina, overtly gendered narratives informed by women’s experience. They are also, like Umbertina, shaped by working-class identity, concerned with working-class history, and thus constantly merge personal and cultural memory.18 Umbertina is about memory and the power of memory. Barolini traces the genesis of Umbertina to a trip to Calabria in 1969, during which she came across a traditional Calabrian bedspread, much like the one described in Umbertina, which in turn triggered a childhood memory of her grandmother. The bedspread that she found in Calabria, woven by women from the mountain villages on huge handlooms, was for Barolini “the most authentic” link to the times in which her grandmother had left Calabria.19

Umbertina begins with Marguerite at a point of crisis in her life, at a time in which she feels compelled to remember her maternal grandmother. And the novel as a whole pulls together the fragile threads of the stories of women immigrants and weaves them into a narrative tapestry, one that will “last forever,” like Umbertina’s “coperta matrimoniale” (44), her bedspread, which she takes with her to America in the bundle containing her family’s few belongings. Barolini unfolds a chronologically linear story which nevertheless requires that the reader look at the three women’s stories as the interconnecting pieces of one design.20 The bedspread stands as a figure for this multigenerational story, for the structure in which it is embedded, and for the intersecting senses of longing and loss that both drive and thwart the lives of the characters. The artifact of Southern Italian American culture functions as a catalyst for the conflicts and ambiguities underscoring Umbertina’s journey as well as that of her female descendants. In this journey, home becomes increasingly undefined and unreachable, expressing the perennial displacement experienced by those who leave their land.21