A year late in writing this review but I absolutely loved this rediscovered classic and I know I would want to read the upcoming book by the author. Valeria and her discovery of self through her journal, a slow, quiet but thoroughly insightful journey. This book has so many quotable quotes and for one written so many decades ago, this book is telling for the struggles of most women world over remain the same as that of Valeria. I loved this book.

I have seen this on several best of lists for 2023 and I can see why, a rediscovered classic for a reason. This is a quiet but powerful book that looks at the role of women in post war Italian. Our protagonist
Valeria struggles to carve out time and space for herself and increasingly questions her own and society’s view of the role as wife and mother. The writing is beautiful, I think this one will stay with me for a while.

Simple but not simplistic; Cespedes' "Forbidden Notebook" is absolutely engrossing with regard to its writing style and absolutely thought-provoking, as far as the themes explored in it are concerned.

This book really is lingering in my mind long after putting it down! Quietly powerful and revelatory in so many ways, and told with such a distinctive voice. I'm genuinely astounded that something this progressive and raw was written 70 years ago. A must-read for anyone interested in feminist history and literature.

I had high hopes after reading the synopsis of this book. Originally written and published in the 1950's, this Italian book was a good look at how life used to be for women and mothers and daughters. There were elements I liked. But I found it a bit slow and repetitive at times.
Written as a diary in a forbidden notebook, the book takes place over a few months and lays bare the truth behind a long marriage, going through the motions rather than actual happiness being there.

An intimate peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of an Italian family in post-war Rome. The voice of protagonist Valeria bursts at the seams with discontent and feminine rage that simmers below the surface of interaction with her family. Alba de Cespedes' authorial voice has echoes of Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante: matter of fact, intimate and philosophical. I thoroughly enjoyed this feminist critique of the role of the homemaker and matriarch.

“I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong.”

So it starts Alba de Céspedes’ famous 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook, a thrilling exploration of female interiority, complicated family dynamics and its divisive underlying economic conditions.

A wide-ranging success on publication, cementing de Céspedes as one of Italy’s most famous authors at the time, it has now been rediscovered by Elena Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein, following the recent Neapolitan mania (Ferrante herself cite Céspedes as one of her influences).

The premise is simple: 43-year-old mother of two Valeria Cossati, living in post-war Rome, decides to buy a notebook from the tobacconist. Forbidden from selling anything other than tobacco on Sundays, the shopkeeper initially refuses, but is convinced after she promises to hide it under her coat.

This action sets the tone for the rest of the novel, as she struggles to keep the diary hidden from her husband Michele, who’s trapped in a lifetime slog in the bank, her insecure son Riccardo and restless daughter Mirella. She stays up every night to write in it, and soon every single aspect of a previously unexamined life is put on the page. The concept of a “mamma soldiering on”, which she embraced unquestionably until then, starts to appear deliberate, at times unjustifiable. As she discovers the extent of her own strength, how dependable others are, and how much life has in stock for her – demonstrated by a sudden shift in her relationship with her boss – she begins to realise that changing her own fate is only a few arrangements away.

Readers will find it compelling, and certainly disturbing, how much the novel still resonates. Money, especially its role in the life of a woman, is at the centre of nearly every diary entry, shaping almost every interaction, decision, and outcome. It sets the novel firmly in the pantheon of A Room of One’s Own, a fervent feminist fictional descendant.

As the whole family arrive at crossroads, each of them is confronted with their own beliefs and prejudices, pushing them to make life-changing decisions with heart-breaking consequences. Whether Valeria was wrong in buying the notebook may be up for debate, but de Céspedes’ dazzling novel is a right testament to the power of the written word.

This is a quiet and intimate novel about a middle aged woman who decides to keep a diary in secret from her family. Writing in the notebook makes her aware of life and its shortcomings and how she subjugated all her feelings to those of her family. The changing roles of women, class and family dynamics are all important themes here.

i thought this was stunning—immediate and urgent and heartbreaking. the diary works as such a perfect form/metaphor for secrecy, confession, self-deception, claustrophobia. will be thinking about this for a while!

"The Forbidden Notebook" by Alba de Céspedes is a powerful and evocative domestic novel that explores the themes of love, desire, and social norms in post-war Italy. The story follows the life of Valeria, who, after purchasing a notebook, finds herself scrutinising herself and her life.

One of the most striking aspects of the novel is its treatment of gender and sexuality. The author challenges traditional gender roles and presents a range of complex and nuanced characters, each struggling to find their place in a society that is in flux. Through Valeria’s experiences, we see the limitations imposed on women in Italy, as well as the ways in which they resist and subvert those limitations.

Another powerful theme in the novel is the tension between tradition and modernity. Valeria is torn between her family's expectations and her own desires, and the novel explores the unmasking of a seemingly normal middle-class family, and the tensions that can tear them apart.

Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante’s works also did an amazing job at the translation of the novel.

Overall, "The Forbidden Notebook" is a beautifully written and deeply affecting domestic novel that offers a poignant exploration of the human experience. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and culture of post-war Italy, as well as for those who enjoy richly layered and character-driven fiction.

This book is not my usual choice or one that I would reach for in a bookshop. I am really glad I requested it. I thought it was extremely well written. It was intriguing and interesting as well as being suspenseful in terms of wanting to know what was happening. I read it very quickly as it wasn't hard to follow.

Forbidden Notebook
by Alba de Cespedes
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

"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"

What makes the journal of a forty-something Italian woman living in 1950s Rome so compelling to me? Valeria is facing down a mid-life crisis. As wife to Michele (who calls her mamma!!!) and mother to Mirella and Riccardo who are on the verge of adulthood, she urgently needs to get her thoughts on paper, but taking even a few moments a day for herself in order to do that feels like she is betraying the version of herself that her family have come to accept. In writing her daily thoughts, her self awareness changes and she realises that her devotion to her family, her servitude, her deference to her husband has turned her into a different person than she set out to be. She pours out her frustrations with her daughter and her flouting of social conventions, her realisation of her dissatisfaction with her marriage, her invisibility among her peers and her growing awareness of her own attractiveness. It is imperative that nobody finds this notebook, with all her inner secrets and herein lies the tension in the story.

This is such a quick and easy read. It is a window into the identity crisis that strikes many a woman who has bent herself out of shape to be the glue that holds a family together. Despite it being set in the 1950s, all the issues concerning love and marriage, family and relationships are as valid today as they were back then. I found myself laughing along at Valeria's strops and spite, who can blame her, and relating to much of her anguish and outrage. If trousseaus were still a thing I'd suggest including a copy of this book in every one! Perhaps a thoughtful gift for the mid-lifer to-be in your life?

Publication date: 2nd March 2023
With thanks to #netgalley and #pushkinpress for the ARC

First published in Italian in 1952 and given a new lease of life with a superb translation by Ann Goldstein (Elena Ferrante’s translator), Forbidden Notebook is a timeless feminist novel from the late Cuban-Italian author Alba de Céspedes.

Our narrator Valeria is an educated 43 year old woman with a husband and two young adult children living a middle class, uneventful life in post-war Italy.

She doesn’t notice her frustrations with her pedestrian bourgeois life until she begins to record her daily life discreetly and very cautiously out of sight of her family, lest they ridicule her for journaling, in a notebook (hence “forbidden”).

Valeria very quickly becomes consumed with recording her daily thoughts in the notebook, leading to deep introspection. Is she too devoted to her husband to pursue a life outside of the home that satisfies her? Can the sense of duty she feels to her family be overcome without tearing the fabric of the family apart?

Though written and set in the 1940s in post-war Italy, there is an timelessness and a crispness to the writing that renders it both classic and modern at the same time. As for Valeria’s travails, in a lot of ways it’s a case of same shit, different decade for women the world over. The ending broke my heart a little.

Fans of Ferrante will love it. An intense, memorable little book. Thanks so much Annie @anniesmanybooks for the recommendation! 4/5 ⭐️

*Many thanks to the publisher @pushkinpress and @netgalley for the ARC. Forbidden Notebook will be published on 2 March 2023. As always, this is an honest review.*

Don't let this book fool you. This diary of a housewife who happens to work as well to support her family is an easy and straightforward read, yet it is one of the best feminist books I have ever read.

It contains multiple layers: the struggle of a woman who has to juggle it all, who is reduced by the people around her to her role of mother/housewife while she wants to be a woman first and foremost, the battle between whom she wants to be and what society expects her to be…

She rebels by buying a notebook and secretly writing and the prospect of maybe upending her family life. Yet she condemns the behaviour and choices of her daughter, while secretly and openly she does and wants the same. This conflicting feelings are one of the most interesting things in this book

The diary reflects her inner battle and the battles the people around her face in a society that’s changing. It feels like an important testimonial of a postwar time where a lot of things are shifting.

Thank you Pushkin Press and NetGalley for the ARC.

Reading this book, you might find the urge in yourself to get a notebook and call it your forbidden diary. The Forbidden Notebook begins with the purchase of a notebook by a woman named Valeria. Valeria is married and has a daughter and a son. She records her daily events and it makes her look more carefully at her life. This can change her life. She suddenly comes to her senses and starts thinking about herself for the first time in many years.She sees how little she has gained and how much she has lost over the years. The forbidden notebook depicts the life of many women around the world. Women who sacrifice everything, even their freedom, in exchange for the comfort of their families.

This is a hugely welcome reprint and new translation of a book originally published in Italian in 1952. Structured as a day-by-day diary, it records the gradual awakening of 43 year old Valeria to her discontents as a woman in a patriarchal society. That's nothing new or novel, of course, but the intimacy, the detail and the specificity of the post-war Roman setting as well as the fluent writing had me completely gripped.

In lots of ways this is a book about a very quiet form of subversion: Valeria secretly buys a notebook which she has to hide from her family as they would laugh at the idea of 'Mamma' (even her husband calls her that) writing, or even having something to write about. To them, if she is sitting down then she has 'nothing' to do and they pile more domestic chores upon her. In a loving way, of course.

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 intergenerational 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.

And, deeply intertwined with Valeria's growing consciousness, is the concept of writing. With a nod to Virginia Woolf's [book:A Room of One's Own|18521] - sadly, still so pertinent - we see Valeria struggling to find the space for her own self identity to re-emerge via the diary: she has to hide the notebook, to sit up through the night to find the time to write, and is much disconcerted by her own intensifying dissatisfactions that escape via her writing.

There is only the bare bones of a plot but there are various contrasting ways of being a woman articulated throughout this book: the wealthy friends who chose a rich man to marry; a traditional daughter-in-law who wants to compete with Valeria; her modern daughter who flouts traditions and wants to be a lawyer - and these triggers release all the complicated emotions that Valeria experiences, the push-pull of a woman caught between the values of the past and a beckoning, seductive, frightening modernity.

I can only imagine how shocking this book must have been when it was first published in 1952. If you love [author:Elena Ferrante|44085], [author:Natalia Ginzburg|21582] (though this is less political in a macro sense), and [author:Anna Banti|104478], add Alba de Céspedes to your list!

At night, when we sit at the table together, we seem transparent and loyal, without intrigues, but I know now that none of us show what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite.
from Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes

Self-knowledge can be dangerous.

A busy mother, juggling a job and family, impulsively buys a notebook. It was Sunday, and the shop owner was forbidden to sell anything but tobacco. She insisted, and he allowed her to secret the notebook out under her coat.

She had to carve out private time to write, neglecting her household duties, staying up late. She wrote about her life, which she thought was happy, but over time she is disturbed to discover that she is not the woman she had believed herself to be.

For the first time she is keeping a secret from her husband. She agonizes over where to hide the notebook, terrified it will be found, first because keeping a diary is considered a juvenile activity inappropriate for a middle-aged housewife, and later for fear of of what was on those pages: a burgeoning awareness of her own needs and desires, her need for space and a place to be alone, her discontent with her children and husband.

It is 1952 post-war Italy. Valeria’s family had once been wealthy. She was a child during WWI, later saw black shirts marching down the streets. As newlyweds, her husband was in the army. She purchased shoes on the black market, and raised her children during the post-war financial struggles.

Valeria’s husband’s salary at the bank was inadequate, so she went to work at a time when few women had a job. She no longer felt in sync her school friends, vapid wives who manipulate their husbands to get more money to spend on themselves. Her daughter is studying law, but rejects traditional values and morals and faith in a pursuit of financial success, becoming involved with an older, married man. Valeria’s student son is in love with an old-fashioned, uneducated girl, who is sidetracking him from his studies. And Valeria’s husband spends his evenings listening to Wagner, dissatisfied with his life, inattentive to his wife. He dreams of a different life.

…I know now that none of us know what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite.
from Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes

Valeria enjoys her work, which brings great satisfaction. She realizes that her boss has feelings for her, and they begin to meet, first at the office on Saturdays, then at cafes or driving in his car. They are both lonely and feel invisible to their families. Valeria is Mama to her husband, no longer ‘wife.’ She is Bebe to her mother. To her boss, she is indispensable.

Each character is brought to a crisis, a decision.

What a marvelous book! There are so many insights that will resonate with women today. Valeria’s understanding of her family and her discontent is slowly revealed. Behind the story looms WWII, fascism, the destruction of the old world and the birth of a new. It is an exploration of love, its limits and failures, the duties that hold families together.

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.

“For the first time in twenty-three years of marriage I’m doing something for myself,” Valeria realizes as she writes in the book. As she discovers her true self, and realizes her family’s real natures, she considers grabbing at a chance for personal happiness. But who is the real Valeria–the woman on the page, or her actions and choices in real life?

I received a free book from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

"I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong"

4,5 - Alba de Cespedes (1911-1997) was a Cuban-Italian author who came to Italy as the daughter of the Cuban Ambassador to Italy (who had previously been President of Cuba). She was an anti-fascist, jailed for her activities in Italy and two of her novels were banned.

But reading 'The Forbidden Notebook' there is no way you could have guessed this biography, because actually it is a very small and intimate diary by a 43-year old mother who is struggling with getting older, with an empty nest syndrome, jealousy of her younger daughter, and hidden feelings of passion.

I enjoyed it very, very much. The writing is simple, but beautiful, reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg and clearly an influence to Elena Ferrante (as often confirmed by Ferrante). It felt a bit gossippy at times, but this served to make relevant points on the position of women (in 1950s Italy) and the expectations society has.

I also listened to an audio-version in Italian on Audible and the 'narratrice' was outstanding.

"I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong. But it's too late now for regrets, the damage is done."

The Forbidden Notebook is a novel that has the quality of something meticulously embroidered: its writing so intentional, its insights so particular, that what you get in the end is something that, like embroidery, feels intricate and painstakingly made--also, so very impressive. The premise of The Forbidden Notebook is a seemingly straightforward one, and indeed one that has long been mined for narrative interest: a housewife becomes increasingly aware of her discontent with her life. And yet the way de Céspedes takes this premise and makes it her own is just remarkable; the narrative that she gives us here is a testament to how, in the right author's hands, a premise like this can provide the grounds for fresh, invigorating, and really profound storytelling.

What is most striking to me about this novel is its precision, the nuance and care with which it presents the interiority of its protagonist, Valeria. It's such a psychologically rich novel, written with a keen eye for the ways in which we are fallible, liable to contradict ourselves, to elide uncomfortable truths. We get to see this unfold through Valeria's entries, which she writes in her "forbidden notebook": entries where she is especially attuned to the dynamics of gender, labour, and money. The family is a microcosm for these issues, and the dynamics of Valeria's family in particular are no exception. There is her fraught, though deeply moving relationship with her daughter, who challenges what Valeria takes for granted about women's roles in romantic and professional spheres. There is Valeria's son, a kind of foil to her daughter, who is more embedded in what's considered "traditional," though this becomes complicated as the novel goes on. And of course there is Valeria's relationship to her husband: its romantic and sexual elements, its economic underpinnings (Valeria works to supplement her husband's income), and, by extension, the division of labour that is attendant to it. On top of all of this, which I thought was fascinating, I loved, too, both Valeria and de Céspedes's attention to spaces and the many ways in which they contour or bring into distinction the characters' identities and roles: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, the streets.

"I often have a desire to confide in a living person, not only this notebook. But I've never been able to; stronger than the desire to confide is the fear of destroying something that I've been constructing day by day, for twenty years, and is the only thing I possess."

More broadly, The Forbidden Notebook is a very layered novel in the way that Valeria tries to understand herself through writing while we also try to understand her through that very writing. Her investment in her own project--however unclear that project is to her sometimes--is also our investment in that same project. Those two things--Valeria's reading of herself, and our reading of her--also enrich the story and add to its already complex dynamics. On the one hand you want to give credence to Valeria's understanding of herself, but on the other you become increasingly attuned to the fact--as Valeria herself does, sometimes--that she is often not truthful to herself, unwilling to put into writing what she really thinks or feels about something. What we get, then, is a tension that persists throughout the novel (one that Jhumpa Lahiri nicely points out in her foreword): a tension between the diary as this way of gaining deep, unfettered access to Valeria's psychology, and the diary as a kind of tool to avoid or gloss over certain truths by way of the editorializing or narrativizing that writing allows.

Incisive, lucid, searing, The Forbidden Notebook is the kind of novel that, to me, feels like a miniature: scaled down but at the same time speaking for something bigger than itself. It's a stunning character study, a feat of realist writing that's a testament to how utterly absorbing it can be to become invested in the small dramas of someone's everyday life.