Forbidden Notebook

Review: 5 stars

During a recent business trip to London, I took a detour to the airport to visit Foyles, one of the largest and most impressive local bookstores. I was in heaven - imagine five stories of neatly stacked books, with feature tables and end-caps tiled with intriguing (not only bestselling) titles! I was specifically looking for ‘Forbidden Notebook’, which I have been wanting to read for a while.

The novel is set in 1950s Rome, and follows the inner narrative of Valeria Cossati, a committed mother to two, dedicated wife and office worker. On impulse in a tobacco shop, Valeria purchases a black notebook, in which she secretly chronicles all the things she does not say to those around her. This simple act of subterfuge - writing her thoughts in a diary - is a rare selfish indulgence for Valeria, and it sparks a re-education and re-examination of her entire life. It also unleashes a pandora’s box of deceit that infiltrates the household. Valeria’s daughter Mirella becomes ensnared in a scandalous romance with the much older Cantoni; her son Riccardo goes to the point of no return with his girlfriend Marina, and her husband Michele pursues a fraught partnership with her filmmaker friend Clara. These tribulations are tirelessly archived by Valeria in the midnight shadows. As she enters into evidence the thousand ways that her family transgresses against society, she realizes as well that they transgress against her rights to individualism. As she sheds her titles of ‘mamma’, ‘daughter’, ‘wife’, ‘friend’, ‘breadwinner’, ‘employee’, ‘paramour’, she simultaneously begins the process of reclaiming ‘Valeria’ for herself.

Elena Ferrante (of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ fame), listed Alba de Cespedes as an inspiration ina , single-handedly reviving recent interest in works that are over seventy years old. But the ideas are as fresh as ever. I would dub De Cespedes to be the 1950s predecessor to Esther Perel, a globally recognized couples therapist and love expert. The incisiveness of de Cespedes’ insights into motherhood and marriage, and how these come to define and unravel one another, was astonishing.

Throughout my reading, I found myself shaking my head in admiration for how perfectly crafted and revelatory her writing is. For example, as Valeria finds herself struggling to connect with her husband of over twenty years, she writes “I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems so natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes”. Then later, she attributes lack of intimacy in marriage to the following: “It’s because we feel that husband and wife who unite in an obscure, silent relationship, after talking all day about domestic matters, about money, after frying the eggs, washing the dirty plates, are no longer obeying a happy, joyful desire for love but a gross instinct like thirst, or hunger, an instinct that is satisfied inherent dark, rapidly, eyes closed. How monstrous.” Or even more poignantly, when forcing her daughter to admit a painful fault: “She spoke concisely, as if to consume as quickly as possible the need to wound herself and to wound”.

Even more interesting are the artificial narratives that Valeria constructs, even as she writes in the notebook - the one place she can be freely honest. Her reluctance and inability to piece together her husband’s infidelity, and how she conjures up a nemesis in her future daughter-in-law, become fictions that are logged as truths. The notebook in the end becomes a version of herself that Valeria vehemently denies, burning it to ashes to return to a skin she wants to wear again - that of the weary, saintly matriarch that gives everything and receives nothing.

One review of the book simply said it was “incendiary” and I cannot agree more wholeheartedly. I am in awe of how deftly de Cespedes took simple moments of everyday life and wove them into an intricate meditation on womanhood. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a lover of fiction at its finest, and to every mother who feels even the slightest bit unmoored.

A Separation | slow, melancholic, fading

Review: 2 stars

‘A Separation’ was the December pick for the ‘Now Read This’ bookclub, and also a well-highlighted book on a number of end of year lists. It also happened to be on sale at BMVQ for one-third the usual price, so I snapped it up. I had heard very mixed reviews about it, as it is “a slow burn of a novel”, but I was optimistic.

The novel follows an estranged wife of a man, Christopher, who has gone missing in Southern Greece. She narrates through a tone that feels emotionally-detached, spoken by someone viewing herself go through motions and reactions, versus experiencing them firsthand. Out of marital duty, she travels to Greece in search of her husband, all the while questioning whether she is the right person to search or to care.

Upon reaching Greece, she begins to pull back the veil on her husband’s public facade. The novel that he was 'almost finished’ has barely begun, the hotel concierge is yet another bedded mistress, his rented room is a slovenly mess. In the scorching sun of Gerolimenas, the small Greek fishing village where Christopher was last seen, her marriage appears desiccated, the could haves and should haves hollowed out. Upon finding her husband’s whereabouts, her reaction is muted, the shock dull and formless. In fact, our narrator appears to muster more empathy for a feuding couple - Stefano and Maria - than she can for Christopher or his parents. Christophers’s fate may come as a surprise to some, but it felt rather anti-climatic in its delivery.

My principal critique of ‘A Separation’ is the deliberate, slow pacing. It may have been selected to conjure the stifling nothingness of a small Greek village in blazing summer heat, or as a metaphor for how a failing marriage dismantles itself, action by action. However, it wore my patience thin, and I found myself flipping ahead constantly to see when the next major plot milestone would take place. I also found it incredibly difficult to connect with the main characters - each felt so cold and removed from one another, and had few redeeming qualities to elicit deep empathy.

I fully appreciate that many could see ‘A Separation’ as a study in careful observation. I also think Kitamura fundamentally achieved what she set out to create. Unfortunately, the story, and more importantly the style of narration, did not resonate well with me.