
Forbidden Notebook
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Alba de Céspedes
With an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante
In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, The 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’ façade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.
An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, The Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.
©1952 Mondadori Libri S.p.A., Milano. English translation © 2023 by Ann Goldstein. Foreword copyright © 2022 by Jhumpa Lahiri. Originally published in Italian as Quaderno Proibito in 1952 by Mondadori. (P)2023 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...




















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a must read
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alternating loss and speculation over the events around her reveal a deeply universal, it seems to me, anxiety in many women’s lives. Furthermore, I realize this book was written in the early 1950s and in that fact reveals so much of what we don’t understand of that time, because the caricature of that era seemingly binds us to a more conventional tableau. In that instance, this book is a revelation. It is literary evidence of the simmering pot that in one more generation would give was to the women movement.
A Revelation
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Basic, yet engaging
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I can see so much of what is her in this book. The attitudes towards women, the women who, like my mother, had to do it all.
Deep insight into the minds and lives of women of that post-war time. Both joyful and sad. I didn’t like *all* the characters, but to me, that’s not the point of a book. The point is to write truth, insofar as we know it; to translate that truth into character and story.
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But this is about the age-old struggle of women to find even just “a room of one’s own.”
UNSETTLING
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