Forbidden Notebook (Paperback)

Subversive, feminist, Alba de Céspedes shook the foundations of literature in post-war Europe and opened, with The Forbidden Notebook, a window to the outside, the world is rebuilt; inside doors, the domestic life of an ordinary woman implodes when she decides to start a diary. Rome, 1950s: Valeria Cossati goes to buy cigarettes for her husband, unaware that she will leave the tobacco shop with a notebook that will change her life. By transforming this notebook into a secret diary where she records everyday thoughts and desires, Valeria transforms it into an instrument of emancipation: she frees herself from social conventions, from the sense of duty to her husband and children, from the self-imposed limits that govern her small world. From here on, everything is questioned. Valeria understands that she is in translation and decides to conquer the place she chose for herself. A rediscovered classic, historical testimony of an era, an exquisite portrait of domestic turmoil, The Forbidden Notebook condenses the thirst for freedom of an entire generation and of the others that would follow. A forerunner of the most disruptive literary lineage of modernity - from Virginia Woolf to Natalia Ginzburg, from Marguerite Duras to Vivian Gornick -, Alba de Céspedes celebrates the power of writing and the indomitable audacity of a woman in a boiling society.