Rainy Tuesday Morning Readings

 Up on time, after a restless night.

I got through the mail – like many things for me, it took longer to get at than get through. The thing to do is now to get calls made and see what can be done about getting the insurance fixed.

I can say this: America needs universal health care. It is just rational.

Reading around: 

• It’s been a standout year for Irish writers – here’s five books to get your hands on (Irish Independent)
• Review of Poor Things film (who would think Alasdair Gray or Yorgos Lanthimos might ruffle feathers; I still have not been able to will myself to watch The Lobster. I have been lax in my movie going this year, but this one, if it comes to Muncie, I will see.)
• 5 Things I Learned About Psychology That Every Fiction Writer Should Know (mind-wandering has helped me; some of my best ideas have come after writing a story, then thinking of something else, and finding something I missed in the story I thought had been written. I do think the act of typing subsumes often the job of writing.)
• And then there was Eleanor Careles' Writing Like a Partisan: A review of Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Céspedes from New Inquiry. Considering how Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz and MAGA creep towards fascism, this one interested me, so quotes follow, as time runs out for getting to work. Having read Elena Ferrante, I am interested in Italian novels and how they deal with politics.
  

From Careles' review:

Alba De Céspedes’ intimate account of the “inescapable, tremendous force of the family” links Italy’s past with its present. In 1952, when Forbidden Notebook was first published, Italy was rebuilding itself as a newly democratic nation; however, while fascism had fallen, the power of the Church––and, consequently the ideal of the indissoluble family––remained strong. Paul Ginsborg writes of how, “in the Catholic world of the 1950s, no social message was preached with more fervour than that of the sanctity of the Christian family.” The formidable force of the family is the governing matrix of De Céspedes’ novel, which captures the tectonic intergenerational shifts, class dynamics and daily textures of postwar Rome in the form of a fictionalized diary. Forbidden Notebook takes the ordinary feelings which might fill the pages of a diary––conjugal discontent, maternal anxiety, shameful disclosure, everyday ennui––very seriously. Without sentimentalism, De Céspedes makes us feel the chronic, dull ache of the suppressed inner life. 

A Cuban-Italian writer from a political family, De Céspedes’ grandfather Carlos Manuel De Céspedes was Cuba’s first president and the leader of its first war of independence. Twice detained for her involvement with the Italian Resistance, De Céspedes’ bestselling first novel Nessuno Torna Indietro, or There’s No Turning Back (1938) was censored by Fascist authorities on the grounds that her depiction of young female students living in 1930s Rome did not conform to a “Fascist ethic.” A collection of short stories, La Fuga, or The Escape (1940) was also censored. In 1943, De Céspedes escaped occupied Rome to join the Allies in the South, where she worked as a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. De Céspedes was a diarist as well as a novelist, and, as Jhumpa Lahiri observes, “Forbidden Notebook fuses these forms and disciplines.” An entry written in 1943 while De Céspedes was a fugitive in the Abruzzi mountains speaks of the guilt of knowing she would not be shot, like her male comrades, if caught by the occupying German forces––her political solidarity dented by virtue of her gender. After the liberation of Rome in 1944, she founded the literary journal Il Mercurio, which became a forum for anti-Fascist intellectuals and published writers including Natalia Ginzburg and Ernest Hemingway.

In the 1940s and 50s, De Céspedes was one of Italy’s most popular and best-known writers, but in subsequent decades, her novels have been forgotten. Forbidden Notebook fell out of print and has only recently been reissued, first in Italy and now, as part of a wave of new editions (Spanish, 2017; German, 2021; Brazilian Portuguese, 2022), in Astra House’s/Pushkin Press’ new English translation by Ann Goldstein, known for her translations of Elena Ferrante. Its use of the diary as a novelistic device places De Céspedes’ Notebook within a feminist literary genealogy that can be traced at least as far back as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). It is a forerunner of Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook (1962), a hugely ambitious work of political commitment, and even of Annie Ernaux’s non-fictional diary Se perdre (Getting Lost, 2001), which writes through, with and around a blaze of female desire.

***

The narrator of Forbidden Notebook, though, is no revolutionary. Valeria speaks with the anguished voice of a “bridge” generation, torn between her parents’ conservative, prewar worldview and the new, progressive horizons that her daughter Mirella moves towards. 

Mother-daughter relations are one of the diary’s most charged and contradictory sites. Valeria is intensely preoccupied with Mirella, to the extent that at times the diary becomes a record of daughterly disobedience. De Céspedes writes with excruciatingly observed detail about the relationship between mother and daughter: as when Mirella, following a tense conversation with Valeria about her older lover, rests her forehead on her hands and starts to cry, keeping her fingers lifted to allow the freshly applied polish on her nails to dry. Mirella’s refusal to conform brings out a stubborn conservatism in her mother. But Valeria confesses to her diary the internal dissonance that underlies her attempts to control her daughter: “what I thought was solid in me loses substance as well.”  The fictionalized diary is a sustained exercise in dramatic irony. And then there is Valeria’s formal, reserved relationship with her own mother, a woman not just of another generation but of another, more aristocratic class. Valeria’s mother represents rigid, traditional values, down to her very posture: “I don’t know how to hold myself like her,” Valeria writes, “maybe because I didn’t wear a corset.” The most marked difference between mother and daughter is the fact that Valeria must work for a living. Valeria’s mother disapproves deeply of this situation; and Valeria’s own daughter is contemptuous of her grandmother’s attitude. As Valeria writes: “In me these two worlds clash, making me groan... Maybe I am only this passage, this clash.” At moments like this, De Céspedes’ writing can turn you inside out.

***

Seventy years after the publication of Forbidden Notebook, the family retains its near-sacred status, as its susceptibility to a fascist politics shows. To question the priority accorded to the family remains virtually unthinkable (with some bold exceptions). What we find in Forbidden Notebook is an attempt to explode the ideal of the family from within: a forerunner of the ‘Dreamers, awake!’ mode that rose to prominence in the art and music of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In the novel-diary, as in her advice column, De Céspedes undoes common-place assumptions and evokes a sense of radical possibility within a conventional format, and through familiar themes: the family, love, sex, relationships. At a time when the family is either weaponised by the far-right, or the final bastion of survival against social and economic precarity in our own anni duri, Valeria’s recommittal to the family reminds us of the difficulty of escaping such deeply rooted structures, but also leaves us longing for a different ending — for the possibility of emancipation from the family’s formidable force. Perhaps stories of failed awakenings are what we need most – reminders of what is at stake, when we undergo a paradigm shift but do not act; when we betray our emergent desires by clinging to what is known, despite the many ways in which it fails us; when the awakened slip back into social and intellectual torpor.

I need to get dressed. It is 6 am. Kind of rainy out there. I need more time to read! No, KH, I am not going back to prison, so i can read all these books that are still unread. 

sch