Alba De Céspedes’ Forbidden Notebook begins with a radical act: a woman buys a notebook. “I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong,” Valeria Cossati writes. It’s 1951, we’re on the outskirts of Rome and, as Ann Goldstein writes in her translator’s note, Valeria has bought her notebook at a tobacconist’s shop on a Sunday, a day when tobacconists were prohibited from selling stationery.
“But it’s too late now for regrets, the damage is done,” Valeria writes. But it isn’t — not yet. Valeria is a dutiful mother and wife; she runs her household; she does work in an office, but only to support her husband, Michele, whose bank job doesn’t quite earn what the family needs.
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. Describing her life makes Valeria realize that her life is worth describing: “I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down,” she writes.
Valeria’s husband and children laugh at the very idea that she might keep a diary. When she mentions the possibility — as a hypothetical, of course — Michele asks, “What would you write, mamma?”
It’s the notebook that makes Valeria realize she “rarely [has] the opportunity to be alone.” She stays up late into the night, pretending to complete chores, to buy herself a moment to write.
For the first month, the main focus of Valeria’s writing is the notebook itself: how she has stolen the time to reflect, how wrong she was to buy the notebook in the first place, and finally — an ongoing, ever-changing struggle — where she has hidden it: in a ragbag, an old cookie tin, the linen closet, the trunk of winter clothes, and on and on.
That she can’t find, or settle on, a single hiding place for the notebook indicates what we already know to be true: though the domestic is considered Valeria’s realm, she has no place in it, and nothing in it belongs to her. “[I]n the entire house,” she writes, “I no longer had a drawer, or any storage space, that was still mine.”
Her fear, at least initially, is not so much that her children would read her notebook, but that they “would have appropriated it” for school notes, for example — that she would lose, in other words, her one possession; that the symbol of her very self would be reabsorbed into the family for their own use.
Valeria’s life is deeply isolated. She has less and less in common with her old school friends, and her other relationships — to her mother, her nearly-grown children, her husband — are tightly circumscribed by convention. With each person, there are things she may and may not discuss and, until she buys the notebook, there is nowhere she can go to freely articulate her own thoughts.
As her writing becomes increasingly mutinous — as she begins to describe opinions and hungers all her own — Valeria begins to worry not only that her notebook will be found, but that it will be read. The paradox here is that, at the same time as everything else, she does hope her notebook will be found; she does and she doesn’t. “Sometimes I think it would be a good thing if Michele found the notebook,” she says. She wants to be seen not just for the role she inhabits in the family — not just as a mother and as a wife — but as a person.
Michele sees “the children between us,” Valeria says, “and all the mountains of plates I’ve washed, and the hours he’s spent in the office and the hours I’ve spent in the office, and all the soups I’ve ladled, as I did last night, while the steam fogged my vision.” But he “doesn’t see me.” It’s an observation she makes repeatedly in one way or another.
As the book goes on, and Valeria keeps writing, it becomes clear that she isn’t the only member of her family to have become, to the others, opaque. She isn’t the only one with a secret. Michele, Riccardo, and Mirella each have their own strivings and desires. Riccardo, the elder, has found a mousey girl for himself; marriage seems imminent. His more rebellious — more modern — sister, Mirella, has taken up with an older man whose intentions are doubted by the rest of the family. Each in their own way, the children have been pursuing — for lack of a better word — love. Meanwhile, Michele, it turns out, has been writing something of his own. But the full extent of what Michele, Riccardo, and Mirella have each been up to — to say nothing of Valeria — becomes clear only at the novel’s end.
In any case, if writing allows Valeria to be known to herself, if not to the rest of her family, that self-knowledge leads not to alienation but to the awareness of an alienation that had already been present, even if it had gone undetected — it’s the awareness of a preexisting condition.
Writing makes Valeria’s desires and dissatisfactions palpable; it makes the events of her day, however mundane, undeniable. She can no longer ignore them. She herself sees this fact plainly: “Before, I’d immediately forget what happened at home,” she writes. “Now, instead, since I began to write down daily events, I hold on to them in my memory and try to understand why they occurred.”
In Valeria’s mind, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. In January, she has a tense conversation with Mirella that she describes in her diary. She soon regrets it — not the conversation itself, but her description. “If I hadn’t written it, I would have forgotten about it,” she writes. “We’re always inclined to forget what we’ve said or done in the past, partly in order not to have the tremendous obligation to remain faithful to it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we would all discover that we’re full of mistakes and, above all, contradictions, between what we intended to do and what we have done, between what we would desire to be and what we are content to be.”
That’s perhaps the notebook’s greatest risk: in writing, Valeria can no longer pretend not to know what she does in fact know — especially what she knows to be true about her marriage, her children, her home. Acknowledging, much less comprehending or confronting, what has happened is a threat to the fragile scaffolding of the family as a whole. This fact, too, Valeria knows: “In the family,” she writes, “you have to pretend not to notice what happens, or at least not to wonder about its meaning.”
It’s a bleak message: family life is tolerable only according to some strict mental arithmetic — namely, the subtraction of anything challenging or troubling. We can only carry on by forgetting, and the forgetting must be practically instantaneous.
Forbidden Notebook was first published serially in 1952 post-war Italy, a world that had endured intense suffering and was in the midst of a series of social changes. Traditional roles were in flux.
But this isn’t just (“just”) the story of one woman’s self-actualization, though that would be radical enough on its own. There is so very much to say about this gorgeous book; I’ve barely scratched the surface. It is also the story of mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons; it is about a country trying to regain some standing, some sense of purpose or normalcy, in the wake of a world war and its attendant deprivations; it is about how the values of one generation may be interrogated by the generation that follows it; and it is also about a particular family. That’s the impossible alchemy De Céspedes achieves here.
[Published by Astra House on January 17, 2023, 288 pages, $26.00 US/$35.00 CAN. With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri]