Reading Group Guide - Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes

READING GROUP GUIDE

ABOUT In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.

Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.

An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

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The novel opens with Valeria Cossati buying a notebook illegally from a tobacconist. What does this act—and the need to hide the notebook from her immediate family­—suddenly reveal to Valeria about her own life?

Valeria notes that her husband, Michele, was the only one who still called her by her first name. So that when he started to call her “mamma,” her identity as an individual, adult woman was lost.

What does the novel reveal about Alba de Céspedes’s opinions on wifehood and motherhood?

In her diary, Valeria observes the women in her life—her aging, conservative mother, her successful and independent school friend Clara, her strong-willed daughter Mirella, as if considering and marveling at their life choices while at the same time feeling uncomfortable—as if none of them are quite right as role models.

And yet, her own choices no longer seem to suit her either. What does this dichotomy say about her sense of self?

The male characters in Forbidden Notebook are all struggling with a major life change—Valeria’s father is retired and bored, her husband aspires to be a writer, her son gets his girlfriend pregnant, her boss is falling in love with her, and Mirella’s beau, Cantoni, is divorcing his wife. How do the men handle these challenges? How do they express their concerns and desires? How do their travails affect Valeria and her choices / decisions?

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

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Of her daughter Mirella, Valeria writes: “I wonder if there is not more compassion in the coldness with which she protects her life than in the weakness with which I agree to let mine be devoured.” Valeria is accused of being jealous of Mirella. Do you think this is true?

How does the relationship between mother and daughter evolve over the course of the novel? What do they learn from each other?

The economic hardships of Italians during and after WWII play a key role in this novel—from the laws restricting the sale of paper goods to housewives like Valeria having to work outside the home.

How do these financial constraints affect Valeria’s marriage? How do they affect her perception of her boss’s advances and of Mirella’s relationship with the well-off Cantoni?

Toward the end of the book, Valeria writes: “Although I’ve always given myself to others, completely, it seems to me that I still have everything to give.” How is this emblematic of Valeria’s choices and the choices of so many women? And does Mirella’s boundary-setting save her from her mother’s fate?

For so many of us, writing, keeping a journal is a way to process our thoughts, the events of the day, our trauma. But for Valeria, the act of keeping a journal turns out to be much more complicated—even dangerous. Can you explore why that is?

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PRAISE “From the novel’s first line—“I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong”— the notebook is equally freighted with self-flagellating judgment and a burning, mysterious desire. Unbeknownst to her husband and children, Valeria begins to keep a record of her observations and feelings, first haltingly, then with increasing urgency and insight. Her practice of writing becomes one of shocking selfrecognition, as she begins to reacquaint herself with the person she is—or could be—outside the restrictive role she plays in the family . . . it is the very smallness of Forbidden Notebook’s scope that makes it so powerful.”

—SARAH CHIHAYA, The New Yorker “The book has been newly revived by Ann Goldstein . . . Its voice remains lively and compelling, and the subjects depressingly perennial: the battle between motherhood and self-actualization; social control over women’s bodies; unpaid emotional and domestic labor; the forces of progress pressing up against the ceiling of convention . . . This is a brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world.”

—TOBY LICHTIG, The Wall Street Journal “The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged . . . It’s political in a wider sense, examining a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts.”

—ROXANA ROBINSON, The Washington Post “De Cespedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force. . . . Forbidden Notebook promises a new cohort of readers, appetites whetted by the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Goldstein, who has a particular skill for conveying the full power of a woman’s emotional register, for locating an undertow of wrath or grief even in stated ambivalence, has reinvigorated the text.”

—JOUMANA KHATIB, The New York Times Book Review “A gripping slow-burn of a book. Domestic mundanity and the impulse toward freedom combine in this critique of marriage, family and fascism . . . Valeria arrives at innumerable clear-eyed epiphanies regarding gender, class and the passage of time, many of them rather unpleasant. But one of de Céspedes’ points seems to be that real liberation is never comfortable or easy—a fact which, if anything, makes that state of being all the more worth pursuing.”

—KATHLEEN ROONEY, Minneapolis Star Tribune “Astounding . . . Forbidden Notebook does not feel 71 years old. Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope.”

—LILY MEYER, NPR

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

—MICHAEL MAGRAS, Shelf Awareness (starred Review) “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) “De Céspedes deftly charts the widening gap between Valeria’s increasingly desperate inner life and the roles she feels forced to play in a feminist novel that consistently calls into question the ways its narrator makes sense of her claustrophobic domestic world. A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.”

—Kirkus (starred review) 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.

—JENNY WU, The Millions “There’s a long tradition of fiction wrestling with mid-twentieth-century middleclass anomie, and it’s in this context that Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden 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.”

—TOBIAS CARROLL, Words Without Borders “A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.”

—LUCY SCHOLES, Prospect “Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere.”

—ANNIE ERNAUX, Nobel Prize laureate and author of The Years

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SUGGESTED FURTHER READING A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg Stoner by John Williams Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante Frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

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ALBA DE CÉSPEDES (1911–1997) was a bestselling

Italian-Cuban feminist writer greatly­influenced by the cultural developments that led to and resulted from World War II. In 1935, she was jailed for her antifascist 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.

After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997.

Author photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

ANN GOLDSTEIN is a former editor at The New

Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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