Forbidden Notebook

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Quella di Valeria è un'implosione sconquassante; di quelle che devastano l'equilibrio di una vita, di quelle che silenziosamente, senza far il più piccolo rumore, senza che nessuno lo riesca nemmeno a percepire, urlano violentemente senza emettere alcun suono, ma solo vibrazioni. Nell'immediato dopoguerra, una donna di quarant'anni inizia a scrivere un diario, di nascosto dal marito e dai due figli. Over the course of this beautiful, wrenching, and delicately constructed novel, which is made up entirely of Valeria’s diary entries, a quiet revolution occurs.” Ellen Nerenberg (1994). Rinaldina Russell (ed.). Italian women writers: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0313283475. What is most striking to me about this novel is its precision, the nuance and care with which it presents the interiority of its protagonist, Valeria. It's such a psychologically rich novel, written with a keen eye for the ways in which we are fallible, liable to contradict ourselves, to elide uncomfortable truths. We get to see this unfold through Valeria's entries, which she writes in her "forbidden notebook": entries where she is especially attuned to the dynamics of gender, labour, and money. The family is a microcosm for these issues, and the dynamics of Valeria's family in particular are no exception. There is her fraught, though deeply moving relationship with her daughter, who challenges what Valeria takes for granted about women's roles in romantic and professional spheres. There is Valeria's son, a kind of foil to her daughter, who is more embedded in what's considered "traditional," though this becomes complicated as the novel goes on. And of course there is Valeria's relationship to her husband: its romantic and sexual elements, its economic underpinnings (Valeria works to supplement her husband's income), and, by extension, the division of labour that is attendant to it. On top of all of this, which I thought was fascinating, I loved, too, both Valeria and de Céspedes's attention to spaces and the many ways in which they contour or bring into distinction the characters' identities and roles: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, the streets.

In her diary de Céspedes confides, “I will never be a great writer.” Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself—for she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her time. In my view, she is one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked." De Céspedes could have easily written a book that spanned a much broader canvas. An ambassador’s daughter who was twice imprisoned for her antifascist political activities, she traveled to Cuba in 1968 to celebrate the centenary of her grandfather’s revolutionary cry for freedom. Her political awareness was keen. As the editor of Mercurio, an important journal of politics, science, and art in postwar Rome, de Céspedes was clearly conversant with an expansive cultural landscape.The book takes the form of a series of diary entries made by 43-year-old Valeria Cossati in Rome in 1950. She is a wife to Michele and a mother of two grown-up children, Mirella and Riccardo. Somewhat unusually for her generation, she also has an office job. Incisive, lucid, searing, The Forbidden Notebook is the kind of novel that, to me, feels like a miniature: scaled down but at the same time speaking for something bigger than itself. It's a stunning character study, a feat of realist writing that's a testament to how utterly absorbing it can be to become invested in the small dramas of someone's everyday life. E attraverso questa finestra cosa vede? Una vita monotona e poco appagante vissuta giorno dopo giorno con gli stessi gesti e gli stessi problemi. Un marito che non la vede nemmeno più come donna e che sogna di diventare qualcuno che non è, un figlio che sogna di cercare fortuna in Sudamerica, una figlia che per evitare la disprezzata vita modesta dei genitori si lega al primo che passa, purché ricco.

DeCespedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force. . . . Forbidden Notebook promises a new cohort of readers, appetites whetted by the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg.Goldstein, who has a particular skill for conveying the full power of a woman’s emotional register, for locating an undertow of wrath or grief even in stated ambivalence, has reinvigorated the text.”In conversational prose as real as can be — the diary-styling-novel and protagonist, Valerie, are both genuine and earnest. terribile pensare che ho sacrificato tutto di me stessa per portare bene a termine compiti che essi giudicano ovvii, naturali." There’s a long tradition of fiction wrestling with mid-twentieth-century middle-class anomie, and it’s in this context that Alba de Céspedes’s TheForbidden Notebook can be neatly situated. But there’s also something about this book that feels furtive, including the title and the conceit behind it—i.e., that this is the record of a frustrated woman who’s been writing her thoughts in secret. It’s the kind of lively narrative in which part of the writer’s compositional skill is creating that sense of unpredictability, and the novel is all the stronger for it." The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged . . .It’s political in a wider sense, examining a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts."