Forbidden Notebook

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Forse bisogna divenire quasi vecchia e avere figli grandi, come ho io, per capire i propri genitori e, specchiandoci in loro, capire un po' più di noi stessi." The war left her chastened but determined to live and to write. She became a major player in the Italian literary scene, publishing a series of novels chronicling this period of social change on an intimate, personal scale. She also edited a journal called Mercurio where she published the giants of Italian neorealism, and wrote an agony aunt column for the popular magazine Epoca. Here she achieved the astonishing feat of gaining enormous popular success and the esteem of the highest-minded writers of her day. At one point Sartre wanted to publish the columns as a book in France and write a preface himself. What she did – here and in her novels – was to combine intimate revelation about women’s bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women’s lives. 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. 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 herself and understand herself even though she is unable to share the same with anyone. Valeria struggles as she reflects on her marriage and tries to hold onto the values and principles she has adhered to all her life. She is unable to reconcile with the way her children, her daughter in particular chooses to lead their own. Her husband attributes her conflicts with Marilla to “maternal jealousy” which gives you an idea of how marginalized Valeria is in her own home. She also shares her budding friendship with a colleague, a friendship that does not come with a preconceived set of expectations, unlike all her other relationships

In her day, Alba de Céspedes was one of the most popular authors in Italy, widely read not just in her own country, but many others too. "She was very well known in her day and then just kind of faded to almost obscurity with many other women writers too," says Goldstein. Alba de Céspedes has gifted us with such a very interesting book in Quaderno proibito (PB: Caderno proibido; EN: The forbidden notebook). It poses a lot of reflections on the condition of women in postwar (WWII) Italy, as mothers, daughters, wives, housewives, workers, lovers; as persons that should be treated with equal conditions, yet are considered just like a token, not to be worshiped, but to be constantly demanded by offsprings, mothers and fathers, husbands, bosses and lovers; and to some extent, by their own moral sense of the world. Azizi is delighted more people will now discover the book. "I'm very excited that something that I grew up with can now be shared by my friends in the United States and around the world. The book is really a testament to that period of my youth, as well as a testament to the power of literature."

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A gripping slow-burn of a book.Domestic mundanity and the impulse toward freedom combine in this critique of marriage, family and fascism . . .Valeria arrives at innumerable clear-eyed epiphanies regarding gender, class and the passage of time, many of them rather unpleasant. But one of de Céspedes' points seems to be that real liberation is never comfortable or easy — a fact which, if anything, makes that state of being all the more worth pursuing." Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (March 11, 1911 in Rome, Italy – November 14, 1997 in Paris, France) was a Cuban-Italian writer. Decades before journaling became a verb, Alba de Céspedes explored in Forbidden Notebook the insidious, inflammatory, radically self-affirming potential of women’s life writing. Like her grandfather ending slavery on his plantation before taking up arms against Spain, she knew that true revolution begins at home. The absorbing and abidingly resonant confession of a woman’s desire to do that most elusive thing: forge a self apart from her caring for others. Forbidden Notebook can also be read as an allegory of fascism, a post-Roe cautionary tale, and corroboration of the revelatory and exhilarating but also implosive power of honest words.”

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.

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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.