The Forbidden Notebook

The Forbidden Notebook / Alba de Céspedes
trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Barcelona: Astra House, 2023, c1952.
210 p.

This novel is a forgotten classic: this new translation has brought it back to the attention of many readers, and I was one of them. I'd heard this being mentioned everywhere, and since it's written as a diary I was especially intrigued - I love epistolary formats. 

But the most shocking thing about this book is how relevant it still is. Valeria Cossati is a housewife in Rome; their household is just hanging on financially, so she's gone out to work. But she's also still responsible for all household duties and chores, including still taking care of her adult children who live at home. Her daughter is chafing to be independent - she's studying law, having an affair, and planning to move out, all choices that contradict expectations. Her son is a man-child, helpless and spoiled, with a younger and docile girlfriend he plans on marrying eventually. And her husband is no longer interested in her sexually or as her own person; he calls her Mama, and is clearly having his own affairs. 

One day Valeria is overcome with the compulsion to buy a small notebook and begins writing her dissatisfactions into it. She uncovers all sorts of feelings she'd been denying for a very long time, and writing them down feels like a transgression. She is always worried about a new hiding spot for her notebook in case anyone should read it. And after all the worry and the writing and the confessions, she has a choice to make - keep writing or resign herself to life.

 

This is a powerful read, full of a quiet fight against patriarchal expectations and limitations. But also a statement about how hard it is for one person to fight alone against all her conditioning and the social mores that fence her in. Her daughter, tougher and younger, might be able to manage it in the years ahead but Valeria has already given in, in some indefinable way. It's the details in this book that really strike me, the descriptions of their home and all its rooms that seem to be claimed by others with nothing left for her, of her more successful friends' lives, of her children and their habits and appearance and behaviours. There's her concern for social niceties and all the shadings of class and propriety that shape her days. And her encounter with an innocuous black notebook that becomes vital to her being. 

I loved this book. The writing style, the characters, the vibe - all so good. So much said in it, and so much to think about. Definitely a great decision to reissue this one now. A must read for lovers of literary fiction about women's lives.