A Cracked Mirror,a Fragmented History and a Path That Always Comes Back to the Beginning: Giose Rimanelli's BENEDETTA IN GUYSTERLAND

Abstract

Benedetta in Guysterland, Giose Rimanelli's first English novel, is not a simple text. The reader is immediately propelled into a continuously changing whirlpool of the 1960s, a significant and antagonistic era in America, and it manifests by the use of a language that explores, evolves and expands with each chapter. To focus the loss of hope of that era in his new social environment (America), Rimanelli interweaves, within this narrative, parallel situations of terror that hurled the Italian peninsula, thirty years earlier, into its atrocious infernal of the Civil War. The author, relying on his classic, Italian medieval literary tradition, contrasts this contemporary historical period with the horrifying realism of the Fascist era. In so doing, Rimanelli is crystallizing the abyss that exists between two very different generations that manifested itself as the “generation gap,” a socio-political dilemma that occupied the country and threatened a war-like confrontation between the groups. The momentum for this clash was a defining moment in American international policy: the Vietnam War. He then, carefully, juggles two different historic periods within two diverse universes at two extremely critical moments in their social and political developments. In so doing, the distinctions and barriers that separate these two realities wear away and coalesce into one, showing that they actually flow from one sphere of existence into the other, thereby creating that which the author calls a “liquid novel.”