Forbidden Notebook

Starred review from November 7, 2022
Late Italo-Cuban author de Céspedes (Between Then and Now) spins a fearlessly probing and candid look at marital dynamics and generational divisions, first published in Italy in 1952. Narrator Valeria Cossati views her life, aside from getting married and having children, as “rather insignificant,” until November 1950, when she starts keeping a journal in pursuit of the idea that “if we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life.” She reflects on her family’s financial troubles, which persist despite her job as a secretary, and society’s domestic expectations of her to prioritize being a mother and wife. Her daughter, Mirella, 19, starts staying out late with a man in his 30s, while her son, Riccardo, resentful of his younger sister’s aspirations, courts a mousy, traditional girl. Valeria’s husband, Michele, buoyed briefly by a raise, loses himself in dreams of a career change, as Valeria, frustrated at Michele’s neglect, fantasizes about an affair with her boss, Guido, and glimpses a richer, more passionate world. The diary takes on a life of its own for Valeria; she calls it “an evil spirit,” which de Céspedes (1911–1997) makes palpable. As Valeria writes, she finds herself “drawn into acts that I condemn and yet which, like this notebook, I seem unable to do without.” Goldstein’s translation invigorates a remarkable story, one that remains intensely relevant across time, cultures, and continents.

Starred review from November 15, 2022
A new translation of a 1952 novel by Italian Cuban author de C�spedes traces the radical impact that writing down her thoughts has on the life of a woman in her 40s. When Valeria Cossati isn't at work, she dedicates all her time to her family, which includes a slightly older husband and two children who are studying law at a university in Rome, where they all live in a cramped apartment. One Sunday morning in November, when Valeria goes out to buy cigarettes to surprise her husband, who's sleeping in, she's drawn to a display of notebooks in the window of the tobacco shop. She can't resist picking up one of the "black, shiny, thick" notebooks. The owner sternly informs her he is forbidden to sell anything but tobacco on Sundays--and then hands her a notebook to slip inside her coat. Once home, she wildly looks for a place to hide it, afraid that her family will laugh at her for keeping a diary when she has such a humdrum life. Over the next six months, as she restlessly moves the notebook from one hiding place to another, she begins to stay up late and neglect her household duties to write down her previously repressed thoughts about her stale marriage, her fraught relationship with her daughter, her worries about her unmotivated son, and her blossoming romantic feelings for her boss. "For the first time in twenty-three years of marriage, I'm doing something for myself," she writes. De C�spedes deftly charts the widening gap between Valeria's increasingly desperate inner life and the roles she feels forced to play in a feminist novel that consistently calls into question the ways its narrator makes sense of her claustrophobic domestic world. A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.

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