Forbidden Notebook
Alba de Cespedes, Ann Goldstein (trans.)
Forbidden Notebook
Alba de Cespedes, Ann Goldstein (trans.)
Out running errands, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. Hiding it from her husband and children, she begins to record and scrutinise her life, writing of the daily domestic routine, her children's struggles in love and minor rifts in her marriage. Gradually, the solid structure of her family life crumbles away, and Valeria discovers the dissatisfaction that has been lurking behind her devotion to her family for years.
Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered classic of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. Written with sharp clarity and insight, it is a haunting story of domestic discontent, and of one woman's powerful reckoning with her own life.
Alba de Cespedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Cuban-Italian novelist, poet and screenwriter. The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Cespedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she did not begin her writing career until after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities. After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy's most successful and most widely translated authors.
Review
Kara Nicholson
It is late autumn in 1950 and 43-year-old Valeria goes out to buy cigarettes for her husband. In the tobacco shop, she sees a stack of black, shiny, thick notebooks. She buys one on impulse but is immediately consumed with thoughts of where she can hide it from her husband and two children in the small apartment in which they live.
She has devoted almost half her life to being a wife and raising children, and as she begins to write her own thoughts down in the notebook, her world both expands and unravels. Valeria had successfully forgotten who she was until the moment she put pen to paper. This act gives her the freedom to have something for herself, to have a secret from her husband and children, and a reason to desire to be alone: so that she can write. The more she fills the notebook the closer she comes to understanding herself, but the more lost she feels in the world.
To read Forbidden Notebook is to be equally captivated and devastated. The realities of domestic life are chillingly dissected to perfection. Ann Goldstein, acclaimed English translator of Elena Ferrante, was intrigued by two references in Ferrante’s Frantumaglia to the author Alba de Céspedes. Ferrante lists a de Céspedes novel as one of the few she could read while she was writing. When Goldstein discovered that de Céspedes was among the most popular and controversial authors in Italy in the mid-20th century (two of her novels were banned and she was imprisoned for anti-fascist activities), she was surprised by how difficult it was to track down her works in print today. When she came across a copy of Forbidden Notebook she knew immediately that it needed a fresh translation into English. Championed by the likes of Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri and Elena Ferrante, Alba de Céspedes is more than deserving of the renaissance her work will now receive.
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