Tag: 5 stars

Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: HER SIDE OF THE STORY by ALBA DE CÉSPEDES (tr. JILL FOULSTON)

Every Alba de Céspedes novel is a world unto itself, and nothing is more vivid, more real, more alive than the women at the center of her novels. In Her Side of the Story we have Alessandra, a protagonist who, remarkably, is named after the three-year-old brother who drowned before she was born: “His name was Alessandro, and when I was born, a few months after his death, I was burdened with the name Alessandra in order to perpetuate his memory.” It is only the first page of the novel, and already de Céspedes is laying out the groundwork of her extraordinarily complex and inimitable narrator.

Her Side of the Story is a 500-page novel, and it is every inch Alessandra’s book. The title of the novel promises her side of the story, and that is indeed exactly what it gives us. In de Céspedes’s hands, though, that “side of the story” is more than just a just a simple recounting of events: instead, the narrative feels like a kind of living document, animated by Alessandra’s love, her anguish, her frustrations, her musings, her memories. What she includes in this document, what she devotes the time and space to describe and reflect on, reveals to us what she deems important–not just important in general, but important to her in particular: to her understanding of herself and her actions, and to her project of writing this narrative.

There is so much that I can talk about when it comes to Alessandra’s/the novel’s–the two are so intertwined that to speak of one is to speak of the other–narrative interests. What stands out most to me, though, is the way that de Céspedes renders everyday life. In Her Side of the Story, de Céspedes does not transform everyday life so much as she is able to see the transformations (personal and political) inherent in it. The act of ironing a shirt, taking a walk, looking out a window, picking up groceries–in Alessandra’s narration these everyday moments become remarkable, sites of tension, tranquility, intimacy, introspection. More broadly, de Céspedes has such a talent for capturing the rhythms of everyday life, the way it is both monotonous and monumental, exhausting and exhilarating; the beauty and the dejection in it, the way it grinds people down, and yet still offers them pockets of space to linger in its richness. I say “people,” but Her Side of the Story is very specifically invested in the everyday lives of women: it’s a novel that is always attuned to the lives that women lead, to the routines that govern their days and the constant labour that underlies those routines.

Her Side of the Story is a novel that pays attention to the everyday, and it is precisely because of this that it is also a political and philosophical novel, feminist in its approach to both. There are these two words that recur throughout the narrative, often together: “love” and “happy.” In those two words is the crux of what the novel is trying to explore: the role that romantic love plays in women’s lives, and the way that love can be so easily figured as the key to their happiness. The novel sees love as fundamentally valuable and necessary to women’s lives, and yet also tenuous and dangerous, destabilizing: how can women relate to love when love, for them, so often becomes subsumed into marriage, an institution founded not on love but on patriarchal gender roles and their attendant hierarchies? What does a “happy” life look like if you’re a poor woman in mid-1900s Italy, and to what extent can marriage be part of that life? These are themes and questions that play out through Alessandra herself, but also through the various other women in her life: her mother, her grandmother, her neighbour, her friend.

Add to all of this the fact that a large part of the story takes place during WWII and it starts to look like the novel is taking on a lot–and it is, to be sure, but it absolutely lives up to its ambitions. What I’m trying to articulate about Her Side of the Story, and what I think makes it so effective, is that it is a narrative that is always able to seamlessly dilate and constrict its focus: finding the micro in the macro, and the macro in the micro. It’s about war, and it’s about getting the groceries. It’s about anti-fascist resistance, and it’s about going to sleep next to your husband every night.

My focus so far has been conceptual–and Her Side of the Story is an incredibly intelligent and astute novel–but in fact nothing in this novel is ever merely conceptual. That is, if the book works conceptually, it is only because it works emotionally. It’s a deeply poignant, devastating novel because de Céspedes shows you how these concepts–love, happiness, marriage, war–manifest in her protagonist’s life. It’s a devastating novel because it is not just love or marriage that we’re talking about, but Alessandra‘s love, Alessandra’s marriage, her life, her joy, her pain. There is no divorcing anything in the novel from Alessandra’s subjectivity, and de Céspedes draws her with such authenticity and compassion that you are always alive to her emotions, sensitive to their every shade.

All of this is to say: Her Side of the Story moved me. I read it over the course of 9 days, and for those 9 days, I was with Alessandra every step of the way. I was deeply invested in her life, I experienced every emotion alongside her, and when her story was over, I genuinely felt bereft. (I especially adored the first section of the novel, which details Alessandra’s early life with her mother, and which de Céspedes writes in such an achingly beautiful way.) I read this novel so carefully, too: de Céspedes’s nuanced writing asks that you pay attention, and I unreservedly gave her my full attention. (I reread so many parts of this novel that I’m convinced I just read the whole thing twice over.) Altogether, Her Side of the Story was not just a brilliant novel, but one that gave me such a special and memorable reading experience. It moved me, it stunned me, it devastated me, it made me cry. I’ve written so much about it in this review already, and yet I haven’t even come close to conveying its startling complexity and richness. Read it, then you’ll know.

Thanks so much to Astra House for sending me a review copy of this beautiful novel!

Blog | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram

Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: A PLACE FOR US by FATIMA FARHEEN MIRZA

I have always been an emotional reader: if a book moves me, I am immediately on its side. What to say about A Place For Us, then, a book that made me cry so hard and for so long that I woke up the next day with swollen eyes? (I wouldn’t have humbled myself and shared that last little tidbit if I didn’t think it was so illustrative of how much I loved this book.)

Let me try again: I have always loved warm novels, and A Place For Us is a novel that is just suffused with warmth. It has such a big heart, the love and tenderness of its story, its characters, its writing palpable and felt on every page. This alone is no easy feat: there is no recipe for how to make a story moving; it’s not necessarily, or not always, about “sad” things happening, and it’s not quite about how many “emotional” things happen, either. We call a story that’s clumsy with big emotions “sentimental.” A story that handles those big emotions with finesse, with authenticity, is a much rarer thing, and A Place For Us is one of those rare novels. The central question to my mind is, Does this story ring true? And in the case of A Place For Us, it absolutely does.

The broadstrokes of A Place for Us are familiar–a religious family, strict parents, children that chafe under all the rules–but where another story would stop there (and let’s be honest, we’ve seen plenty of Western depictions of Muslim families go this route), this one takes the time to shade in those broadstrokes so that what is drawn in stark lines becomes blurrier, more nuanced. More than anything, Mirza’s novel is about the lived experience of a family, and as such it’s a novel that is antithetical to any kind of stock narrative where parents are Evil or religion is Bad. As a book about that lived experience, A Place For Us dwells in its complexity, the realities of being part of this family as a father, a mother, a daughter, a son. Again, I could describe these characters to you in broadstrokes–the strict father, the mother who is trying to understand her children, the eldest daughter of whom the most is always expected, the young son who feels himself unable to fit into this family–but they are so much more than these broadstrokes could possibly convey, and indeed the entire novel is a testament to how irreducible they are to any handful of traits or experiences.

To me, A Place For Us is a novel of lived experience not just because it so deftly evokes the idiosyncrasies of life for the people in this particular family, but also because its very narrative style feels true to life. The story is told to us non-linearly, shifting between scenes from these characters’ childhoods, adolescence, young adulthood, and everything in between. In any other author’s hands I would’ve been concerned, but at no point in this novel did I feel like the non-linearity disrupted the story in any way. In fact, it lends the narrative a sense of authenticity and richness that it wouldn’t have otherwise had. A linear story makes it too easy to draw a line from beginning to end, from cause to effect; as one character puts it, “Hadia could draw no straight lines from the past”–and so the novel won’t either. We don’t get straight lines from the past, but rather a kind of patchwork quilt approach to time. We get different kinds of scenes–tense, painful, joyful, contemplative–from different points in time in these characters’ lives, and it feels like the novel is remembering things about its own characters, granting us access to these characters by way of this patchwork of memories and all their attendant emotional experiences. All of this is to say, the scenes in the novel don’t have to be chronologically related for them to still feel related; a scene from the past helps reflect on the present, is a chord that gives it a different resonance, that changes the tenor of the subsequent scene.

So A Place For Us takes us through different moments in time, but it is also critically anchored in a particular time and place: the eldest daughter Hadia’s wedding. The novel starts with this wedding, and so it exerts a kind of gravity that the rest of the story bends to. We know, from the wedding, that things have ended up a certain way–the son, Amar, estranged from his family for three years–and so are able to pay attention to how that came to be, and why. There is also a section of the novel that comes after that I won’t talk about so as to not give away anything, but suffice it to say it made me cry like a baby.

Earlier on, I talked about how A Place For Us handles big emotions with finesse, but what stands out to me, too, is how it is able to evoke big emotions in small moments, to show that even while those moments are small they are still tied to everything that came before them, and everything that they will continue to influence thereafter. There’s this scene in the beginning of the book where the characters, still children, are at a park marveling at a fireworks display, and it encapsulates so perfectly what it feels like to read this novel: to have that big and wondrous and moving thing of the fireworks, and to have it juxtaposed to, and enmeshed in, this ordinary and everyday thing of sitting on the grass at the park.

I just adored this novel. That it made me cry so much, affected me so deeply, is not because it was a tragic or sad novel (though it does have those moments), but because it is simply a well-crafted, compassionate, and generous novel, one that is empathetic to its characters, attentive to their psychologies, open to their shortcomings, but also, and importantly, their capacity for growth.

Blog | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram

Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by ALBA DE CÉSPEDES (tr. ANN GOLDSTEIN)

“I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong. But it’s too late now for regrets, the damage is done.”

The Forbidden Notebook is a novel that has the quality of something meticulously embroidered: its writing so intentional, its insights so particular, that what you get in the end is something that, like embroidery, feels intricate and painstakingly made–also, so very impressive. The premise of The Forbidden Notebook is a seemingly straightforward one, and indeed one that has long been mined for narrative interest: a housewife becomes increasingly aware of her discontent with her life. And yet the way de Céspedes takes this premise and makes it her own is just remarkable; the narrative that she gives us here is a testament to how, in the right author’s hands, a premise like this can provide the grounds for fresh, invigorating, and really profound storytelling.

What is most striking to me about this novel is its precision, the nuance and care with which it presents the interiority of its protagonist, Valeria. It’s such a psychologically rich novel, written with a keen eye for the ways in which we are fallible, liable to contradict ourselves, to elide uncomfortable truths. We get to see this unfold through Valeria’s entries, which she writes in her “forbidden notebook”: entries where she is especially attuned to the dynamics of gender, labour, and money. The family is a microcosm for these issues, and the dynamics of Valeria’s family in particular are no exception. There is her fraught, though deeply moving relationship with her daughter, who challenges what Valeria takes for granted about women’s roles in romantic and professional spheres. There is Valeria’s son, a kind of foil to her daughter, who is more embedded in what’s considered “traditional,” though this becomes complicated as the novel goes on. And of course there is Valeria’s relationship to her husband: its romantic and sexual elements, its economic underpinnings (Valeria works to supplement her husband’s income), and, by extension, the division of labour that is attendant to it. On top of all of this, which I thought was fascinating, I loved, too, both Valeria and de Céspedes’s attention to spaces and the many ways in which they contour or bring into distinction the characters’ identities and roles: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, the streets.

“I often have a desire to confide in a living person, not only this notebook. But I’ve never been able to; stronger than the desire to confide is the fear of destroying something that I’ve been constructing day by day, for twenty years, and is the only thing I possess.”

More broadly, The Forbidden Notebook is a very layered novel in the way that Valeria tries to understand herself through writing while we also try to understand her through that very writing. Her investment in her own project–however unclear that project is to her sometimes–is also our investment in that same project. Those two things–Valeria’s reading of herself, and our reading of her–also enrich the story and add to its already complex dynamics. On the one hand you want to give credence to Valeria’s understanding of herself, but on the other you become increasingly attuned to the fact–as Valeria herself does, sometimes–that she is often not truthful to herself, unwilling to put into writing what she really thinks or feels about something. What we get, then, is a tension that persists throughout the novel (one that Jhumpa Lahiri nicely points out in her foreword): a tension between the diary as this way of gaining deep, unfettered access to Valeria’s psychology, and the diary as a kind of tool to avoid or gloss over certain truths by way of the editorializing or narrativizing that writing allows.

Incisive, lucid, searing, The Forbidden Notebook is the kind of novel that, to me, feels like a miniature: scaled down but at the same time speaking for something bigger than itself. It’s a stunning character study, a feat of realist writing that’s a testament to how utterly absorbing it can be to become invested in the small dramas of someone’s everyday life.

Thanks so much to Astra House for the review copy of this!

Blog | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram