{"id":162577,"date":"2022-12-02T10:30:26","date_gmt":"2022-12-02T15:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162577"},"modified":"2022-12-01T18:46:27","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T23:46:27","slug":"forbidden-notebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/02\/forbidden-notebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbidden Notebooks: A Woman\u2019s Right to Write"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Alba de C\u00e9spedes pictured in the Italian magazine Epoca<\/em>, vol. VII, no. 86, May 31, 1952. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Forbidden<\/em> evokes, to my English-speaking ear, the biblical fruit whose consumption leads to shame and expulsion from Paradise. Eve\u2019s story is not irrelevant to a novel like\u00a0Alba de C\u00e9spedes’s Forbidden Notebook<\/em>, in which a woman succumbs to a temptation: to record her thoughts and observations. Valeria Cossati\u2019s impulse to keep a diary\u00a0leads not so much to the knowledge of good and evil as it does to the self-knowledge advocated by Socrates and serving as a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry ever since. In Valeria\u2019s case, it also leads to solitude, alienation, guilt, and painful lucidity.<\/p>\n

The Italian title of Forbidden Notebook<\/em> is Quaderno proibito<\/em>\u2014literally translated, \u201cprohibited notebook.\u201d Forbidden<\/em> and prohibited<\/em> may be interchangeable in English, but the latter lacks the romance that might soften the former (as in \u201cforbidden love\u201d), and connotes instead legal restrictions, interdictions, and punishment. The word prohibited<\/em> comes from the Latin verb prohibere<\/em> (its roots mean, essentially, \u201cto hold away\u201d), which was fundamental to legal terminology in Ancient Rome. It is the word de C\u00e9spedes chooses to describe Valeria\u2019s notebook, and to interrogate, more broadly, a woman\u2019s right, in postwar Italy, to express herself in writing, to have a voice, and to hold opinions and secrets that distinguish herself from her family.<\/p>\n

The act of purchasing the eponymous notebook, along with the ongoing dilemma of how to conceal it, drives the tension as the novel opens. Having purchased it illegally and smuggled it home, Valeria hides it in various locations\u2014in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin. But she always runs the risk of it being discovered by her husband and grown children, all of whom laugh at the mere idea that she might want to keep a diary.<\/p>\n

As soon as she buys the notebook, Valeria is anxious and afraid, but she is also armed\u2014for although acquiring a diary throws her into crisis, the quaderno<\/em> is both an object and a place, both a literary practice and a room of one\u2019s own. In lieu of walls and a door, pen and paper suffice to allow Valeria, albeit furtively, to speak her mind. Thematically, I would call this book a direct descendant of Virginia Woolf\u2019s groundbreaking treatise and Mary Wollstonecraft\u2019s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em>. It\u2019s just that Valeria does not consider herself an author but rather a traditional homemaker. Her writing is surreptitious, and she must lie to tell the truth.<\/p>\n

De C\u00e9spedes was herself a writer and a diarist; Forbidden Notebook<\/em> fuses these forms and disciplines. The diary was for her (as it is for so many writers) preparatory ground not only for her artistry in general but for a series of searing first-person female protagonists who are at once invented and real. Melania Mazzucco quotes from de C\u00e9spedes\u2019s diaries in her introduction to the 2021 reissue of\u00a0Dalla parte di lei<\/em> (From her side). Already in that novel published in 1949\u2014which is also concerned with women\u2019s rights and roles\u2014de C\u00e9spedes is experimenting (as the title clearly suggests) with an intimate first-person female narrative. Three years later, in Quaderno proibito<\/em>, the diary commands center stage.<\/p>\n

The private becoming public, the individual subject dividing, and the writer becoming her own reader and vice versa\u2014the diary, an elusive, elastic container, straddles all this and more. Diary writing may be the most private of forms, but when placed within the context of a novel or when it serves, as it does here, as the structure of the novel itself, this form of confession\u2014dating back, at least in the Western tradition, to Augustine\u2014contradicts its very nature.<\/p>\n

From Petrarch to Gramsci to Woolf to Lessing, all diaries and notebooks, whether intended for publication or not, whether invented by their authors or not, whether framed as (or within) novels or not, are dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubling and self-fashioning. They are declarations of autonomy, counternarratives that contrast with and contradict reality. The form of the fictionalized diary has always been especially appealing in that we get to know the character not only as a person but also as a writer. This additional authorial persona is especially provocative in light of the fact that female consciousness has struggled to find its place in history and in the literary tradition.<\/p>\n

In her diary de C\u00e9spedes confides, \u201cI will never be a great writer.\u201d Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself\u2014for 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 time. In my view, she is one of Italy\u2019s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked.<\/p>\n

Whether or not we choose to read Forbidden Notebook<\/em> through a feminist lens, it is a radical novel. Freshly translated by Ann Goldstein with her signature energy, it blazes with significance. Women\u2019s words are still laughed at, still silenced, still considered dangerous. De C\u00e9spedes vindicates, artfully and ardently, a woman\u2019s right to write\u2014a right that must never be taken for granted. Ironically, the harshest condemnation in Forbidden Notebook<\/em> is generated by Valeria herself, who both speaks and threatens to cancel herself out at the same time.<\/p>\n

I discovered de C\u00e9spedes when I was researching for and assembling The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories<\/i>, an anthology\u00a0that featured forty Italian authors who were writing short fiction in the twentieth century. I included one of her short stories in that volume and was curious to read more of her work. An Italian friend suggested I read Quaderno proibito<\/i>, and I was lucky enough to find a used paperback copy at my local flea market in Rome. Mondadori has recently reissued a few of her books, but even seven years ago it was hard to find her titles in Italian bookstores and very few people mentioned her work. She was one of those amazing authors and literary figures that most people had stopped reading and had largely forgotten about. I have kept a diary for decades, and I also teach a course on the diary as literary practice and form, so reading this novel was doubly exciting for me.<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
Jhumpa Lahiri teaches creative writing and literary translation at Barnard College. A writer in both English and Italian, she is the author of <\/em>Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize<\/em>.
\n<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

This is an adapted extract of the foreword to Ann Goldstein\u2019s English translation of<\/em> Forbidden Notebook<\/a> by Alba de C\u00e9spedes, forthcoming from Astra House in January. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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