Extremely Distant and Credibly Close: The Exilic American Fiction of Angela Bianchini

Especially in her fiction, Angela Bianchini (1921-2018) presents a multifaceted America, one which, while bearing clear parallels with her exilic and immigrant biography, progressively reflects her protagonists’ search for independence and their realization of a literary vocation. Exile in America appears to be the prerequisite for much of her narrative; the new social and existential environment defines a macrocondition of self-expression. The journey West of her ragazze, “ebree, quasi, senza saperlo” ‒ from Europe to the Western desert through suburbia ‒, is like a double mirror which reflects, in both directions, the many layers (public and private, real and imagined) of mid-Twentieth-century Italo-American relations. Bianchini, a Roman Jew, lived in the U.S. from 1941 to 1953, escaping the Italian 1938 anti-semitic laws. In 1945 she defended the first doctoral thesis supervised at Johns Hopkins by Leo Spitzer. Likewise her essays (above all Voce donna, 1979) often make room for dense and elegantly provoking American sections, which extol women’s contribution to U.S. history. Genre variations and gendered points of view figure among the chief components of her major quasi-trilogy (Le nostre distanze, 1965; Capo d’Europa, 1972-1991; Nevada, 2002), deserving of a critical reappraisal, like all of her work, still under-recognized.