Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse – she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, the constant churn of the domestic routine and her fears that her husband will discover her new habit. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart.
Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered jewel of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. A captivating feminist classic, it is an intimate, haunting story of domestic discontent in postwar Rome, and of one woman’s awakening to her true thoughts and desires.
Reviews
Electric… de Céspedes’s novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk… Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense, Forbidden Notebook is an exquisite, tormented howl
Financial Times
I don’t think I’ve read a finer unpicking of a complex mother-daughter relationship… A damning portrait emerges of the prisons on which modern family life is built. It is devastatingly effective, a tour de force
Sunday Times
Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings atmosphere
Incendiary: a bomb beneath the bed that has been made for her. Turning its pages, the feeling grows that all women, metaphorically speaking, keep a little black book just as Valeria does
Observer
Still speaks to women’s lives today… For the reader, the discoveries of the notebook emerge as discoveries of freedom. We share Valeria’s pleasure and release when she manages secretly to write
Guardian
Feels strikingly contemporary… a newly rediscovered classic of Italian literature that draws an arc between the domestic and political, and between women of decades past and now
New Statesman
One of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers
While I’m writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I call them books of encouragement, like those by Alba de Céspedes
[Valeria] soon makes an enraptured confidante of the reader… The writing sparkles with candour and self-awareness
Irish Times
The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged… recalls Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante… Her story is one from which no one may look away, told in words that stay ringing in the mind
Washington Post
Rarely has uncovering someone’s innermost thoughts and desires felt as powerful as in Alba de Céspedes’ 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook
BBC Culture
A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Prospect
Recently rediscovered, her work has lost none of its subversive force… What might have been a family story becomes an excruciating study of the diarist herself
New York Times
Quick, propulsive, and addictive. Intimate, smart, and smoldering… capturing an almost mystical, transcendently luminous awareness
LA Review of Books
Intimate, quietly subversive
New Yorker
The absorbing and abidingly resonant confession of a woman’s desire to do that most elusive thing: forge a self apart from her caring for others. Forbidden Notebook can also be read as an allegory of fascism, a post-Roe cautionary tale, and corroboration of the revelatory and exhilarating but also implosive power of honest words.
Valeria begins to keep a record of her observations and feelings, first haltingly, then with increasing urgency and insight… It is the very smallness of Forbidden Notebook‘s scope that makes it so powerful
New Yorker
Brilliantly and acutely observed
Literary Review
The insights Valeria gains as she writes are as intoxicating as they are painful, because they make her aware — for the first time — of the constraints of her own existence; rigidly delineated by morality, social anxiety and self-denial. A secret missive from a past that is not over yet. Ruthless, perceptive, suspenseful
Astounding… Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope
NPR
How writing can become an outlet for freedom… how it can do so, without one even realizing it — this is what Alba de 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
A fearlessly probing and candid look at marital dynamics and generational divisions, first published in Italy in 1952… Goldstein’s translation invigorates a remarkable story, one that remains intensely relevant across time, cultures, and continents
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
