Forbidden Notebook By Alba de Céspedes
An Italian novel of a woman's self-struggle, translated by Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri
By Alba de Céspedes, foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein
288 pages. Astra House. $26.
I will reveal two embarrassing things in this review. The first one concerns the contents of my diary. Here is a rather typical excerpt from August of 2021:
Was I lazy today? I dunno. Not really, I worked pretty hard until around 3pm. Then after some lazing about, a grocery trip, I made vegetarian goulash and fell into that lethargy you get after a big meal. But it wasn’t the worst kind of lethargy I’ve ever had.
My next diary entry, from a few days later, reads simply, “Blah day.”
My diary entries are rarely diary entries, rarely summaries of what I do in a day. They are closer to being records of what I am thinking about that day, but really they are stream of consciousness recordings of my feelings at the moment I am writing them. They are the space where I allow myself to write badly, and write badly I do. To make them even more useless, I also frequently write about current events around the world that I have no direct connection to and little knowledge of.
Some people keep diaries for the benefit of future historians. As a form of cultural preservation, they record small details of everyday life that would otherwise be forgotten. These people keep their diaries on physical paper, in case all the data on the internet is lost. This seems to me the most noble form of diary keeping an ordinary person can do, though I don’t think it’s something I will ever attempt.
The most significant fact of Forbidden Notebook, the 1952 novel by Alba de Céspedes, is that it takes the form of a diary. The diary is kept by Valeria, a middle-aged Italian woman in the early 1950s, and it basically concerns what it means for a women in Valeria’s position to keep a diary: the way it allows her to express frustrations and desires she would otherwise barely consider without it, and how she changes through the mere act of describing her life in words. Her notebook is “forbidden” because she breaks some arcane law of post-war Italy when purchasing it, but to her the reason it feels forbidden is because it allows her a level of independence and autonomy that, while not explicitly prohibited, is not exactly allowed to her.
Valeria has a husband, two university-aged children, and an office job. Her husband works for a bank. They are firmly within the middle class, but the economy of postwar Italy is not kind to anyone but the very wealthiest: they can only afford basic necessities and some small luxuries. Valeria is not exactly an everywoman, but the particular burdens of a woman’s life – particularly, of a middle-class, middle-aged woman’s life in 1950s Italy – push very heavily upon her.
Her third diary entry contains her most important observation: “As I reread what I wrote yesterday, it occurred to me to wonder if my character began to change the day my husband, jokingly, began calling me ‘mamma.’ I liked it a lot at first, because it seemed to imply that I was the only adult in the house [..] But now I see that it was a mistake; he was the only person for whom I was Valeria.” Now only Valeria knows herself as Valeria: her parents still call her “Bebe” and her friends know her by her school nickname; for just about everyone else, she’s “Michele’s wife, the mother of Riccardo and Mirella.”
Less than a matriarch but more than a servant, she manages not just the cooking, cleaning, and finances of the household, but also its emotional stability. Her duties (including her job) do not give her much free time; she has to write her diary entries quickly, furtively, in short moments she snatches for herself when no one else is around. In the rest of her waking hours, Valeria shoulders so many of the burdens of adulthood that she cannot feel the independence that comes with being an adult (or perhaps this independence was never expected for a woman of her upbringing). 1
Her son and daughter are both university students. They are not legally full adults – in 1950s Italy, that only comes at 21 – but they are able to be full, autonomous human beings in a way that Valeria is not. They both study law, and they are both looking toward marriage. Her son has a girlfriend and a vague business opportunity from a friend, though he seems careless with his future, without clear plans for either his work or his marriage. But Valeria is much more worried about her daughter Mirella, who has secretly been seeing a man in his thirties, a lawyer with a growing reputation in Rome. Mirella’s “hidden” life, of nighttime rendezvous with this man, and other persons unknown to the rest of her family, are Valeria’s greatest obsessions, and the way she is both repelled and allured by her daughter’s life (or what she imagines to be her daughter’s life) leads to the novel's most dramatic and penetrating passages.
De Céspedes was herself a diarist. Jumpha Lahiri, in her introduction, gives us only one sentence from the De Céspedes diary: “I will never be a great writer.” Lahiri comments, “I take her to task for not knowing something about herself. For she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her times.”
Regrettably, I am more inclined to agree with De Céspedes’ view of herself than Lahiri’s. If De Céspedes was a great writer, she was at least not a great writer based on the evidence from Forbidden Notebook, though I would not go so far as to call her a bad writer. To me she is almost quintessentially a very good, but not great writer.
What are the very good parts of Forbidden Notebook? At its best, De Céspedes seamlessly blends Valeria’s story with her self-examination. Dialogue is always a tricky part of writing a fictional diary, but the best passages of Forbidden Notebook come from its dialogue – the snippets of conversation that Valeria remembers and writes down. The dialogue is natural enough to be the dialogue in a play, but we also believe that they are also the words Valeria would go out of her way to record.
Outside of dialogue scenes, Valeria’s prose tends towards the aphoristic and self-examinatory: “Maybe there are people who, knowing themselves, are able to improve; but the better I know myself, the more lost I become. Besides, I don’t know what feeling could stand up to a ruthless, continuous analysis; or who among us, reflected in every action, could be satisfied with ourselves.” But unfortunately, here is where I have to acknowledge that this doesn’t quite work in a novel: a fictional diary, since it has no real-life referent, must surprise us with the precision and originality of its contents, but the blandness of the language (“know myself,” “besides,” “stand up to”) makes the novel feel insubstantial.
OK, time for the second embarrassing thing I will reveal in this review. Some weeks ago, I was at a literary party, and I told someone about my newsletter, mentioning that I had recently reviewed a new translation of Red and Black. She asked what I thought of it, and I told her it was pretty good, and then she asked me if I had read the French original. When I told her I hadn’t, she asked how I was able to assess the quality of the translation. “Oh, I guessed,” I responded.
Reviewing a translated book without also having read the version in its original language always means that the job can be done at most only half right. Forbidden Notebook strikes me as a book where this problem is highly acute. It is written in a particular voice from a particular place and time; and despite Ann Goldstein’s considerable skills as a translator, it is inevitable that the English-language version is written in translationese, its language lacking in individual character. This explains why I was so disappointed with the novel, and why a pretty good book in its original language can be a pretty bad one when translated.
Great novels, however much they lose in translation, are still great novels. Some pretty good novels, too, can leap the boundaries of language: The Oppermanns, a pretty good but not great novel, lost little (I would wager) in translation, as its story documented a striking moment in history, and its style was distant and clinical. But Valeria is a personal, conversational narrator, and my appreciation of Forbidden Notebook would no doubt have been enhanced had I read it in the cadences of 20th century Italian prose rather than in a place-less 21st century English. Again, this is not a criticism of the translator, Ann Goldstein, whose rendering is consistently elegant; however, the friction of translation is always an inevitability, and in reading Forbidden Notebook it irritated me.
I have just written a negative review, but a somewhat apologetic review, and in doing so undermined my qualifications as a critic. But I have sacrificed myself for a noble cause. I have made the case for why we should read literature in multiple languages, and also why we should not be distressed by the inevitable fact that we must read some classical works in translation.
Especially someone who spent most of her adulthood amid the chaos and repression of fascist Italy and the various wars it undertook; these years of suffering are everywhere in Valeria’s memories but are barely acknowledged in her everyday conversations.