What’s at stake emerges in a powerful exchange between Ginzburg and Céspedes in Mercurio in 1948, republished in the NYRB. Here Ginzburg bemoans the “bad habit” women have of “falling into a well”, floating or even drowning in “the dark and painful waters of melancholy”. Céspedes responds by saying that, though she agrees, she believes the well itself can be a source of strength. “Because every time we fall in the well we descend to the deepest roots of our being human.” And, deeply intertwined with Valeria's growing consciousness, is the concept of writing. With a nod to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own - 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. Indeed, Valéria is very contradictory in her pursuit of the best of both worlds; the one she can be free from her family and moral obligations and the one she attaches herself deeper to these same moral and social obligations. Which one might get the upper hand on her?

De Céspedes could have easily written a book that spanned a much broader canvas. An ambassador’s daughter who was twice imprisoned for her antifascist political activities, she traveled to Cuba in 1968 to celebrate the centenary of her grandfather’s revolutionary cry for freedom. Her political awareness was keen. As the editor of Mercurio, an important journal of politics, science, and art in postwar Rome, de Céspedes was clearly conversant with an expansive cultural landscape. 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." De Céspedes was the daughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (a Cuban ambassador to Italy) [2] and his Italian wife, Laura Bertini y Alessandri. Her grandfather was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who is the father of the nation of Cuba, [2] and a distant cousin was Perucho Figueredo. She was married to Franco Bounous of the Italian foreign service, later ambassador to Cyprus and Pakistan. [3] From a 1958 letter by De Céspedes, it can be evinced that the two had taken the decision to split, a request made by Bounous, due to her inability to follow him due to her professional career. [4] Eventually, however, the couple would stay together until Bounous's death in 1987. [1] Her work [ edit ] This is Valéria's case, a woman trapped in a moral and social "prison" built around her by those who claim to love her but also by her own sense of moral and social position and situation. But, from the moment Valéria starts to write in her forbidden notebook, the world she avoids noticing appears in front of her eyes. The spoken word has its power, though ephemeral. On the other hand, the written word has an everlasting power because it remains, it advises, it stays. No wonder dictatorships, populists and others love to burn books. 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.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. 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." 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] 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."

Forbidden Notebook is a sly indictment of marriage and generational conflict, as relevant today as it was in postwar Italy." 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

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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.” With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Forbidden Notebook is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. It is impossible not to be impressed by this important and beautifully translated book, as well as by de Céspedes’s masterful handling of so many complex interpersonal and existential subjects.” My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of the children. Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. 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. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing, I’m afraid not.” Nell'immediato dopoguerra, una donna di quarant'anni inizia a scrivere un diario, di nascosto dal marito e dai due figli.

She criticizes and judges her daughter's behaviour, Mirella is almost finished her law degree and decides to start working part time for a prominent lawyer, she is seeing an older, successful and sophisticated man - she is not yet 21 - still a minor, and treated as such by her mother - yet in the notebook, she admires the independence she is developing, the confidence and assurity she exhibits. I know now that none of us know what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite. Yet the power structure of domestic space works as both template for and mirror of those larger sociopolitical structures. Both can be egalitarian, life-affirming spaces of experimentation and play or authoritarian regimes of surveillance and control. Reconfiguring the intimate sphere can upend the world. All four members of the Cossati family struggle, as the narrative subtly makes plain, with thwarted ambitions and the pain of being misunderstood by those closest to them; the structure of domestic life itself begs to be reimagined.While de Céspedes lived a life of political resistance out loud, the protagonist of her novel Forbidden Notebook, Valeria Cossati, leads a far quieter, smaller existence. Issued serially in 1950 and 1951 in the popular illustrated Italian magazine La Settimana Incom Illustrata, which featured film stars like Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Grace Kelly on its covers, Forbidden Notebook is a domestic novel structured as the secret diary of a petit bourgeois, 43-year-old working wife and mother. Yet portraits of intimacy and domesticity, as de Céspedes well knew, can be powerfully political—even incendiary. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asked feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser in the 1960s. “The world would split open.”