Forbidden Notebook

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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." Yet, the more she notices all the wrongness around her, she treats her family motherly, very understanding to her husband and her son Riccardo, but fierce towards her daughter, Mirella, who tries to break away from the social and moral concepts of the time and follow a freer life. Here, Valéria also notices how much she wants to break free from these social and moral norms, and the more she tries, the more she understands how strongly she is attached to them.

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.The novel was originally published as a serial in a magazine, La Settimana Incom Illustrata , over the same six-month span as the diary entries in the book. Like her protagonist, De Céspedes also kept a diary – though her own life was far removed from that of Valeria's. Born in Rome in 1911 to a Cuban father and Italian mother, De Céspedes' grandfather was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who led Cuba's fight for independence from Spain and served as the country's first president. Her father also briefly served as president. Alba was married at 15, had a child at 16, and divorced by 20. She then began a writing career, initially as a journalist and later as a novelist and screenwriter. She was jailed twice for anti-fascist behaviour in 1935 and 1943, and in 1948 founded a literary magazine, Mercurio, that published writers including Ernest Hemingway and her contemporary Natalia Ginzburg. In the 1950s, she wrote a popular advice column. "Her life was quite different [from Valeria's]," says Goldstein. "But what is the same is the issues that she faced, like struggling between marriage and her career and what it meant to be a woman and whether women could or couldn't do certain things, and if not, why couldn't they?" Valeria’s thoughts turn repeatedly to issues of socioeconomic class as they manifest in the material realities of her daily life and the lives of those who surround her: her elderly mother, still clinging to memories of the family’s lost prewar grandeur; Valeria’s friends, who don’t work outside the home yet enjoy a leisured luxury and engage in conspicuous displays of the jewels and furs their husbands buy them; and the many pleasures her wealthy boss enjoys. “The rich are afraid,” Valeria suddenly realizes, observing his anxious awkwardness with quotidian tasks she easily manages. She’s sure her family would laugh at her so she ‘hides’ it. ….constantly finding new hiding places in their family cramped in their small apartment.

Her new secret activity lead her to scrutinizing herself and her life, more closely. She soon realized that her individuality was being compensated.

What she did – here and in her novels – was to combine intimate revelation about women’s bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women’s lives.” Valeria ha quarantré anni, un marito e due figli ventenni: a quarantatré anni, negli anni cinquanta, in Italia, una donna, madre di famiglia e con un lavoro part-time, è abituata a considerarsi vecchia. Astounding . . . Forbidden Notebook does not feel 71 years old. Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope.” A quiet book that only unfurls its full rage over the course of time. The novel’s progressiveness, perhaps even its scandalousness, lies in its offhandedness — especially if you consider the time in which it was written. How writing can become an outlet for freedom… how it can do so, without one even realizing it — this is what Albade Céspedes reveals, in clear, unobtrusive language, allowing readers to marvel, in the reverberations of her sentences, at how topical this book still is to this day.” The book has been newly revived by Ann Goldstein . . . Its voice remains lively and compelling, and the subjects depressingly perennial: the battle between motherhood and self-actualization; social control over women’s bodies; unpaid emotional and domestic labor; the forces of progress pressing up against the ceiling of convention . . . This is a brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world."

Alba de Céspedes has gifted us with such a very interesting book in Quaderno proibito (PB: Caderno proibido; EN: The forbidden notebook). It poses a lot of reflections on the condition of women in postwar (WWII) Italy, as mothers, daughters, wives, housewives, workers, lovers; as persons that should be treated with equal conditions, yet are considered just like a token, not to be worshiped, but to be constantly demanded by offsprings, mothers and fathers, husbands, bosses and lovers; and to some extent, by their own moral sense of the world. Valeria is anxious and consumed by feelings of guilt and fears that her secret diary will be discovered. Multiple times throughout her diary she shares how difficult it is for her to hide this diary and how she keeps changing where she keeps it. She yearns for a “space” that she can call her own – her bedroom is occupied by her husband who spends time listening to music or reading in his free time, her children have their own rooms and she is left to write her entries at night after everyone is asleep in constant fear of being discovered. 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.” With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Forbidden Notebook is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante.I know now that none of us know what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite.