Forbidden Notebook

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As Valeria continues to write in the notebook, she realizes she isn’t very happy — Her husband and children expect so much from her around the house, taking her presence, the cooking, and the chores she completes for granted. She works in an office, something her mother continues to frown upon. She doesn’t particularly care for Mirella and Ricardo’s significant others and her husband spends a lot of time at work and with a female friend who alleges she can help him sell his movie script. Valeria enjoys writing as it’s something for herself. She seeks a designated space to do so in the family apartment but with everyone else’s needs and activities this isn’t possible. The insights Valeria gains as she writes are as intoxicating as they are painful, becausethey make her aware -- for the first time -- of the constraints of her own existence; rigidly delineated by morality, social anxiety and self-denial. A secret missive from a past that is not over yet. Ruthless, perceptive, suspenseful."

Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere.” Volevo essere sola, per scrivere; e chi vuole chiudersi nella propria solitudine, in famiglia, porta sempre con sé il germe del peccato" 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.In recording her thoughts and feelings, she starts to rediscover who she is outside of her family, uncovering needs and desires that had been overtaken by her domestic duties. "I'd always thought I was transparent, simple, a person who had no surprises either for myself or for others," she writes. Some of my favorite parts of the book… (and I believe me I liked it all…yet I’m pretty clear it’s not for everyone)…. a b "Fuori dagli schemi: Vite da romanzo di grandi scrittrici" (PDF). Biblioteca N. Ginzburg. 8 March 2012.

L'unico luogo dove la sua persona è valorizzata e le sue competenze riconosciute è sul lavoro. Dove rivendica nuovamente il ruolo di persona, di donna, provando anche una passione tanto forte quanto proibita per il suo datore di lavoro. Se non siamo aperti alle persone care, con le quali viviamo giorno dopo giorno, con chi lo siamo? Quand'è che siamo veramente noi?" The diary is filled with confessions and secrets about her marriage, her daughter, her son, her parents, her friends, work, housewife & parenting responsibilities, her lifestyle, the choices she’s made, regrets and gratefulness, her wishes and dreams for herself and both her adult children. De Céspedes 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."nonostante tutto Valeria, con un'implosione che scuote tutto il suo essere, con una richiesta muta di aiuto, che irrita, provoca dolore, fa venire voglia di prenderla a schiaffi per provocarne una reazione, ma che è più forte di un qualsiasi urlo a pieni polmoni, è capace di rinunciare a tutto: anche a se stessa. But she chose the seemingly small scope of one woman’s interior world—her reflections upon her crowded apartment, her troublesome family, her ordinary office job—and chose to publish the novel in a venue that reached a broad popular audience. She deliberately used the vehicle of the domestic novel to explore issues of class, gender, and war. Over the course of six months [there] are reflections on motherhood and femininity in postwar Rome that were as urgent and revelatory in the 1950s, when the novel was originally published, as they are today in post-Roe America.” Der Novembertag an dem Valeria das glänzende Notizbuch beim Tabakhändler kaufte, war warm und sonnig, fast noch sommerlich. Noch war ihr nicht klar, dass dieses Heft ihr Leben verändern sollte, auf eine Weise die sie weder beabsichtigt hat, noch zu glauben vermochte. Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere."

But this is not simplistic in any way. It emerges that Valeria struggles with her own internalised misogynistic and patriarchal values and it's only gradually, through the analysis that the space of writing affords her, that she starts to come to terms with her life and its fixed parameters. This is as much about bourgeois values, about the limitations caused by money worries, about inter-generational tensions, about what happens in a long-term marriage when love and desire become domesticated and overcome by the pressures of parenthood in a tiny apartment, as it is about the life of a woman. De Céspedes 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.”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. 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." Die kleinen, alltäglichen Nichtigkeiten wahrzunehmen, heißt vielleicht, der Bedeutung des Lebens auf den Grund zu gehen.“ (S. 38)

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. Valeria’s “forbidden” notebook, proves to be an outlet for her most private thoughts, a place she can vent her frustrations, anger, and disappointment towards her marriage, her husband, her children and life in general. Valeria’s diary gives her a voice and the opportunity to be hers The concept of a hidden diary, a space for recording thoughts that you weren't allowed to share publicly, resonated for those living in a repressive society. "What I really loved personally was this confessional tone," says Azizi. "This idea that you can reach a kind of emancipation by the power of words alone. For someone growing up in the repressive Islamic Republic, it was really powerful, because of all the things we couldn't do. We did live this double life."

Valeria’s mother’s house is filled with large family portraits. Valeria will inherit them, but they are too big for her modest apartment. As her mother tells her how to treat the frames, she knows she can’t keep them. “It began in wartime,” she thinks, “suddenly you could die and things had no importance compared to the lives of human persons…The past no longer served to protect us, and we had no certainty about the future.” Her mother belongs to the old world, and her daughter the new world. In her diary de Céspedes confides, “I will never be a great writer.” Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself—for she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her time. In my view, she is one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked.” Half a century later and an ocean away, his granddaughter Alba de Céspedes (1911–97) also lived her life in public and on a grand political stage. A Cuban Italian writer and freedom fighter born in Rome, she worked as a reporter, bestselling novelist, screenwriter, radio personality, journal editor, and antifascist activist before, during, and after World War II: a bold, principled, politically engaged creative intellectual. 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.”