Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes
| Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: Reading this felt like entering into the murky world of private thoughts and shameful secrets, but through a postwar Italian housewife's guilt-ridden, duty-burdened conscience. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 272 | Date: March 2024 |
| Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1782278221 | |
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We women know one another too well
This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in the most intimate and revealing ways.
Set in bourgeois postwar Italy, the novel follows Valeria Cossati, a middle-aged woman who secretly chronicles her inner thoughts and frustrations in a notebook, defying societal expectations and gradually uncovering long-suppressed truths about herself and her family. The first person voice and diary entry form are devastatingly effective at making us Valeria's accomplices in her epistolary transgressions and micro-rebellions. As it unfolds, the pages become a minefield of denial, paranoia and hypocrisy, one which embodies Valeria's generation of women in bourgeois postwar Italy. Indeed, Valeria's constant state of turmoil is a product of Italian society's struggle between the progressive new generations and their retrograde counterparts.
Through Valeria's own eyes, she metamorphoses from, effectively, a blank page for others in her life to write their projections onto, into a veritable volume so complex and dense that she begins to write her own script. The closing entries are beautiful; Valeria seems to emerge from shadowy boscage into a celestial clearing, catching sight of herself for the first time, and allowing herself to question her relationship with her own children, her mother, and her husband. In particular, the mother/daughter dynamic is sketched with the most intricate and heartbreaking attention to detail which was accentuated by the mother's anxious and sometimes spiteful tone, in her reactions to Mirella's distressing actions. I will say that the narrative slowed a little in the middle, and the way that Valeria managed to keep her diary so secret seemed a little unrealistic. Nevertheless, the constant anxiety Valeria felt about her notebook being discovered injected suspense into the narrative when things got a little slow.
Ultimately, The Forbidden Notebook is a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of a woman's journey toward self-awareness and autonomy, in a society determined to stifle her voice. The story of the invisibility of middle-aged women is also the central theme of Jane Shilling's The Stranger in the Mirror: A Memoir of Middle Age, which is recommended for readers who enjoy this book.
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