Forbidden Notebook

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Sempre di più mi convinco che l’inquietudine si è impossessata di me dal giorno in cui ho comperato questo quaderno: in esso sembra nascosto uno spirito malvagio, il diavolo.” 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.

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.With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. Forbidden Notebook is a sly indictment of marriage and generational conflict, as relevant today as it was in postwar Italy." 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. 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." De Céspedes worked as a journalist in the 1930s for Piccolo, Epoca, and La Stampa. In 1935, she wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri. Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that led to and resulted from World War II. [5] In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity. [2] In her work, there is a recurring motif of women judging the rightness or wrongness of their actions. [2] In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels were also banned ( Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940)). In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. [2] From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an advice column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca. [6] She wrote the screenplay for the Michelangelo Antonioni 1955 film Le Amiche. Her work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics. [7]

Mas tenho 43 anos e parece-me vergonhoso recorrer a pueris subterfúgios para escrever num caderno. Assim, é absolutamente necessário que confesse a Miguel e aos pequenos a existência deste diário e afirme o meu direito de me fechar num quarto a escrever sempre que me apeteça. With a sediment of both thoughts and feelings, we get intimate understandings and observations about …. A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.” Postwar Italian neorealism was one of the most exciting literary movements of the 20th century, but it’s only recently that the female neorealists have had the attention they deserve. In 2018, the publisher Daunt began its vital championing of Natalia Ginzburg, and now Pushkin brings us Alba de Céspedes. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s.

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A quiet book that only unfurls its full rage over the course of time. The novel's progressiveness, perhaps even its scandalousness, lies in its offhandedness -- especially if you consider the time in which it was written. How writing can become an outlet for freedom... how it can do so, without one even realizing it -- this is what Albade Céspedes reveals, in clear, unobtrusive language, allowing readers to marvel, in the reverberations of her sentences, at how topical this book still is to this day." Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. 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. Andreoni, Annalisa (2023). Il «Diario di una scrittrice»:Alba de Céspedes e la collaborazionea «Epoca» tra il 1958 e il 1960. Griseldaonline. p.176. ISSN 1721-4777.