Tag Archives: Alba De Céspedes

An Italian Predecessor of “The Group” & the Threat of the Algorithm in a Women’s Prize-longlisted Novel

Fans of the Italian writer Alba de Cespedes (1911-1997), the author of Forbidden Notebook, will love her first novel, There’s No Turning Back. It reminds me of Mary McCarthy’s The Group: both tell the stories of eight women who are friends in their university days. There’s No Turning Back was published in 1938 and The Group in 1963, but both are set in the 1930s, and they make good companion novels.

In There’s No Turning Back, a group of young women live in a Catholic residence run by nuns in Rome. Unlikely friendships are formed by proximity. Most of the characters are university students, but there are exceptions. The wealthy Emanuela is not a student, and she has a secret: her illegitimate child lives in an institution, and she has moved to Rome to be near her. Xenia, a mediocre literature student, is devastated when her thesis is rejected, and rather than go home to live with her parents, she pawns a stolen necklace and reinvents herself in another city. Bookish Silvia, who does some of her best research for her professor, thinks quickly on her feet: she saves his unhappy wife from a not very serious suicide attempt. (The professor knows nothing about it.) Then there’s Augusta, a lost soul who stays in her room and writes bad novels all day, but eventually turns her fiction into a feminist manifesto. All of the women have secrets of one kind or another.

De Cepesdes’s novels are addictive. Every sentence is graceful and lucid, and every detail is sentient. My favorite of her novels is Her Side of the Story, but No Turning Back is also a tour de force. She has become one of my favorite writers.

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, is a literary science fiction novel set in a future where internet data is collected to predict crime. Not only does the Algorithm analyze your data but it records and judges your dreams through a popular implant called Dreamscape. One day when Sara returns from London and is standing in the Customs line at the L.A. airport, she is taken out of the line to be questioned by the Risk Assessment Administration. The Algorithm says it is probable that she will murder her her husband, a conclusion based on data twisted out of context and dreams. And so she is sentenced to a retention center, which is like a prison, without criminals or crime.

The whole thing is terrifying, in light of the development of AI. (Not that I’ve read any of the articles on AI: it’s too like science fiction!) And of course Sara has no history of violence. That goes without saying. She lives quietly, an archivist with a husband and twin babies. It is nightmarish to be torn away from her family.

Lalami’s portrait of Sara, who is seemingly stuck forever in the retention center – her sentence keeps getting lengthened –vividly charts her routine and the changes in her character. From the daily nauseating watery oatmeal to the mindless work in a laundry and lack of soap during a pandemic, the routine is deadening and, during the pandemic, sickening. Sara’s intelligence helps her survive, and helps others survive, too. But clearly no one ever gets over living in a retention center.

Lalami’s muted, intelligent style bars the door to the hysteria of us readers. Yes, all of us should immediately become Luddites and destroy our electronic devices, as we’ve concluded many times before, but few of us do, nor does Sara, who uses an unreliable email system at the retention center to communicate.

Lalami, who won the American Book Award and the Arab-American Award for her novel The Moor’s Account, is a serious writer. This novel is quiet – possibly too quiet for true science fiction readers – but I see it as a dystopian classic.

The Culture of Women’s Love: “Her Side of the Story,” by Alba de Cespedes

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I have read quite a lot in translation lately.

My new favorite novel is Her Side of the Story, by the Italian writer Alba de Cespedes, translated by Jill Foulston. You may have read de Cespedes’s Forbidden Notebook, which was published last year.

Her Side of the Story is longer and deeper, a brilliant, half-mythic sketch of the culture of Italian girls and their mothers in the 1930s and ‘40s, and an exploration of the women’s universal disappointment in married love.

Published in 1949, this elegant novel is narrated by Alessandra Torregiani. She is looking back at her past as a solitary young girl who adores her mother, a former concert pianist and an itinerant piano teacher. In the first third of the book, Alessandra describes her impoverished girlhood in an apartment building where all the women are neglected by their husbands and most have lovers. It is a bit surreal: all these women dreaming of love, waiting to experience what marriage promised and failed to deliver. No one judges the adulteresses: even Alessandra and her friend, Fulvia, knew the lovers by sight, and Fulvia’s mother has a lover, known as the Captain. And later Alessandra’s beautiful mother, who is happiest when her husband is absent, falls in love with Hervey, the older brother of one of her students, who shares her passion for music. This does not end well: there is a shattering event that affects the rest of Alessandra’s life. But certainly this pattern of true love, then marriage, then disappointment in married love, is repeated throughout the novel.

De Cespedes writes both dreamily and painfully about the cycle of women in love. Of course Alessandra forgets her observations about marriage when she falls in love with Francesco Minelli, a professor, in 1941. Their love is an idyll, and she assumes it will continue so after marriage. But he is never at home: they no longer take long walks on weekends or go to cafes. He is a radical university professor, involved in the Resistance, and devotes all his time to going to secret meetings. Alessandra has a secretarial job, and is also a literature student, but she is alone and lonely in the apartment. There is no women’s community in this apartment house, as there was in her childhood home. She still loves Francesco obsessively, but can’t get his attention. Eventually, he loses his job. But as he becomes more and more involved in dangerous anti-fascist politics, she is increasingly disappointed and upset by their deteriorating relationship.

De Cepesdes’s lucid, pitch-perfect narration of depression and obsession will make you grieve for Alessandra’s disappointment in love, and for all the other women’s disappointment in love.

Here is an example of the insightful, beautifully-written prose.

I was no longer interested in a degree. I preferred to read with no order or plan, although only regular, methodical study drew Francesco’s attention. I wanted to stay at home with him, he with his books and I with mine, but he was always busy these days, nervous and easily irritated. I once heard him talking on the radio, and when I heard him say, in our rooms, things that had nothing to do with us or our affairs, he seemed to be truly lost. He was always seeing people and pursuing interests that were different from me. He was locked in his world, finding life and passion in it: everything that had been our world no longer interested him.

Jill Foulston’s translation is superb. I loved this book and strongly recommend it. And I hope more of de Cespedes’s books will be translated soon.

A Woman’s Diary: “Forbidden Notebook,” by Alba De Céspedes

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Forbidden Notebook, a layered, hyperrealistic novel by the Cuban-Italian writer, Alba De Céspedes, takes the form of a woman’s diary. Published in 1952, it is newly-translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, best-known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s superb novels. Every sentence in Forbidden Notebook is spare and graceful, but the narrative itself is torturous and depressed. The narrator struggles to evade knowledge of her desolation even as the emotions pour out on the page.

The diary itself is purchased on impulse. One day the perennially-exhausted narrator, Valeria, is at the tobacconist’s buying cigarettes for her husband when she decides to buy a shiny black notebook. Her daughter writes a diary, and Valeria decides to begin one.

Valeria realizes she must hide the notebook- to tell the truth about herself is forbidden. But she has no hiding place: her daughter hides hers in the only locked drawer in the apartment.

The diary is an odyssey into her feelings. Valeria has never had time to think: she works at an office and spends the rest of her time shopping and doing the housework. Her family does not appreciate her efforts: her husband, Michele, lounges around listening to Wagner, and her adult children, Riccardo and Mirella, have an active social life. Valeria seethes with fury about her children’s bad choices: the brilliant, studious Mirella is secretly dating a 35-year-old married lawyer, while Riccardo studies less than he should and dates an unintelligent teenager.

Writing becomes Valeria’s secret vice. She stays up late, sometimes till 3 a.m. so she can write. She realizes that the “effort to forget myself for 20 years has been in vain.” And as she describes her problems and misery, we are distressed and even shocked: Valeria is a slave. The family had enough money before the war, but the economy is bad now and they barely get by. Valeria manages the household.

Valeria has no privacy. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. If anyone needs a room, it is Valeria. They do not even have a living room in their cramped, cheerless apartment: it was converted into a bedroom.

Finally she cannot bear the lack of privacy. She takes her diary to the office on Saturday, but her boss interrupts, because he, too, needs time away from his family. And then a romantic relationship begins. Finally she seems happy.

But Valeria constantly feels guilty, because the family is splintered. “Today was torturous,” she writes when her son makes a life-changing mistake. She begins to respect her daughter, but also resents her opportunities.

Her husband, Michele, is completely self-centered: he hates his job at the bank, but feels entitled to his time off and is oblivious to Valeria’s feelings.

Valeria writes,

The need to earn money, to read the newspaper to follow political events, gives him the privilege of isolating himself, protecting himself; whereas my job is to be devastated. Because when I write in the notebook, I feel I’m committing a serious sin, a sacrilege: it’s as if I were talking to the devil.

The strict socialization of woman as helpmeet has quelled Valeria’s sense of autonomy. The role of women is changing for her daughter’s generation, and Valeria is half-pleased, half-jealous.

Valeria’s forbidden notebook is is brilliant, but tragic. Wait till you’re in a good mood: it is a sad, depressing read.