Tag: translated

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!

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Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT by ELENA FERRANTE (tr. ANN GOLDSTEIN)

The Days of Abandonment is a novel about that cliché of all clichés: the wife whose husband has left her for another (younger) woman. Of course, it’s Ferrante, so what she makes out of this trope is a narrative that is stunning in every sense of the word.

The wife in question here is Olga, and from start to finish she is the backbone of this slim but potent novel, every inch of the story deeply and viscerally tied to and animated by her state of mind. The novel is not about Olga so much as it is her. With the first line of the novel–“One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me”–we witness this rupture in her life, and then the rest of the story is left to pick up the pieces in the wake of this rupture. And reader, it is not a pretty picture: this novel works precisely because it is so unrelenting in its depiction of the absolute intractability of Olga’s thoughts and feelings. To say that Olga is “sad” because her husband leaves her is to do a disservice to the unflinchingly brutal way in which Ferrante crafts her perspective. Olga is not merely “sad,” she is unmoored, she is dissociating, she is furious, she is crude, she is helpless, she is violent, she is desperate–throughout the novel, you can almost feel the pages warping under the sheer force of her emotions, their almost breathless quality. All of this is to say, Ferrante takes you to the lowest of the lows of this woman’s life, and then makes you stay there. There is this middle chunk of the novel that takes place over a single day and it is just brutal; chapter after chapter of Olga struggling to get a hold of herself, to ground herself in something, to escape what feels like an inescapable situation.

“Something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings. Sometimes I abandoned myself to it, at times I was frightened. Those words for example: I didn’t know how to find answers to the question marks, every possible answer seemed absurd. I was lost in the where am I, in the what am I doing, I was mute beside the why. This I had become in the course of a night. Maybe, I didn’t know when, after protesting, after resisting for months, I had seen myself in those books and I was in a bad shape, definitively broken. A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.”

If it’s not clear already, The Days of Abandonment was a difficult novel to read; indeed, finishing it felt like coming up for air. Despite this, though–or rather, because of it–it was a novel that was well worth the read. Ferrante’s writing transforms the cliché of the abandoned woman into something that is as compelling as it is viscerally affecting: Olga knows she is cliché, Ferrante knows she is a cliché, we know she is a cliché–and yet Olga is devastated all the same, and we are left to witness all the tangled and painful fallout of that devastation. And I think that’s exactly the point: The Days of Abandonment is not really interested in reinventing this cliché so much as depicting its bloody aftermath, zeroing in on all those ways (psychological, emotional, intellectual, financial, logistical) in which marital abandonment is not simply an uncoupling–wife detaches from husband–but a violent tearing apart.

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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!

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