What might have been a family story, with all its betrayals and unhappy detours forgotten, becomes an excruciating study of the diarist herself ... Ann Goldstein, who translates Ferrante’s writing and 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.
It is the very smallness of Forbidden Notebook’s scope that makes it so powerful. It was originally published as a serial in the weekly magazine La Settimana Incom Illustrata .... Reading it, I often imagined what it would have been like to encounter these installments in real time, perhaps reading them at a kitchen table, in a cramped apartment, after the rest of the household had gone to bed—in the very same kind of moments that Valeria spends writing in the notebook.
Its voice remains lively and compelling (despite some jarringly odd decisions by Ms. Goldstein), 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 ... Over half a year, the story unfolds with smoldering intensity as we come to realize that each of the four family members nurtures his or her own illicit secret ... This is a brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world.
Brilliant ... The result is a layered construct of awareness, reflection and understanding ... The tensions within the family unfold in evocative vignettes ... A fraught, powerful novel.
... 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.
It is maddening to watch Valeria at once discover and defend her plight, yet de Céspedes never renders her pitiable. Nor does she let readers get too optimistic, though possibilities of change and escape glimmer constantly on the horizon. Valeria is ensnared not only in her family, but her times — though 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.
The pressures of this society and culture—evident in everything from Valeria's mother's attitude to the concerns about what the porter might think—are nicely made clear. How much Valeria (unlike her daughter) is stuck in them and can do little better than write about her situation is particularly nicely realized in Forbidden Notebook. The novel and what Valeria struggles with remain far too relevant in far too much of the world even seventy years after its first publication.
De Céspedes could have easily written a book that spanned a much broader canvas ... She deliberately used the vehicle of the domestic novel to explore issues of class, gender, and war ... Forbidden Notebook’s pace is quick, propulsive, and addictive. Intimate, smart, and smoldering, newly translated by Ann Goldstein... Forbidden Notebook joins a global canon of work... unapologetically restricting its focus to the world of traditionally feminine concerns—home, family, romance, the convulsive desire for a prettier hat—while subtly engaging political issues and capturing an almost mystical, transcendently luminous awareness.
A fearlessly probing and candid look at marital dynamics and generational divisions ... Goldstein’s translation invigorates a remarkable story, one that remains intensely relevant across time, cultures, and continents.
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.
