Alba de Céspedes’s novel “Forbidden Notebook,” published in 1952 and newly translated, contends with the liberating—and sometimes, limiting—insights that come with self-examination.
—we meet Valeria Cossati as she strolls through the streets of Rome, feeling a “childish pleasure” that’s rare in her busy life as a wife, mother, and office worker. She stops in a tobacconist’s shop to pick up some cigarettes for her husband, Michele. Waiting in line, her eyes fall on “a stack of notebooks in the window. They were black, shiny, thick, the type used in school, in which—before even starting it—I would immediately write my name excitedly on the first page: Valeria.
While reading a published diary, either real or fictional, it can be easy to focus on its content: a diary offers the illusion of pure internality, a glimpse directly into the writer’s soul. To this end, “Forbidden Notebook” is a tragic romance, on one level between Valeria and a potential lover, but, on a deeper level, between the persona she presents to her family, friends, and co-workers and the private self that she discovers as she writes—that is, between Valeria and the notebook itself.
That childishness soon becomes a kind of second youth. As Valeria writes more each day, she begins to see herself as vibrant again; as her mind awakens from its self-imposed torpor, so, too, does her body awaken to the gaze of others—and her own. Although in the fall she couldn’t even allow herself to rest, or to think about what she might want or need, by the spring she has cultivated the skill of self-regard: “I find time to look at myself, to write in my diary.
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