—Elena Lappin, The Washington Post
"De Cespedes' work has lost none of its subversive force”
—The New York Times Book Review
* "De Céspedes’s melancholy testament to a hidden life feels timeless and vital."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.”
As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.”
Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.
In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.
In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy.
—Elena Lappin, The Washington Post
"De Cespedes' work has lost none of its subversive force”
—The New York Times Book Review
* "De Céspedes’s melancholy testament to a hidden life feels timeless and vital."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.”
As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.”
Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.
In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.
In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy.
Critiques-
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September 1, 2023
A young woman looks back on her life in Rome before and during the Second World War in this new translation of an Italian novel first published in 1949. Alessandra Corteggiani grows up in a middle-class home, full of romantic longing and shadowed by the memory of a brother who died before she was born. She's tightly attached to her mother, whose artistic ambitions have been reduced to teaching piano and who passes along to Alessandra a well-thumbed copy of Madame Bovary. Like the other mothers in their apartment building, Alessandra's is involved romantically with one of the "younger men of a slightly higher class" who hang around in search of afternoon dalliances. When her mother dies unexpectedly, Alessandra's father sends her to live with his large extended family in southern Italy, though her refusal to accept a proposal from a local farmer--and her strangling of the family rooster--get her booted back to Rome. She spends two years in an "endless, dark tunnel" of office work, university studies, and housework for her father. Then she falls in love with Francesco Minelli, an academic and anti-fascist agitator 11 years her senior, and dedicates herself completely to cultivating the "great love" for which she has always longed--a project which, to Francesco's detriment, he seems only marginally aware of as he continues with his own life and projects through the war and beyond. Readers shouldn't expect much in terms of plot twists. Instead, de C�spedes immerses the reader in the febrile consciousness of a young woman with too much time on her hands and too many overpowering fantasies about a long series of men with agendas of their own. A lavishly detailed critique of romantic ideals and social constrictions.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from September 25, 2023
In this devastating chronicle of a woman’s life, first published in Italy in 1949 and previously appearing in an abridged English version, de Céspedes (1911–1997; Forbidden Notebook) frames her heroine’s most intimate struggles within the context of women’s discounted status in mid-20th-century Rome. Alessandra, a gifted student, grows up in modest circumstances. Her bureaucrat father is cold and distant. Her beloved mother, Eleanora, is a beautiful pianist who supplements the family income by giving lessons. Alessandra lives for a time with her father’s family in the countryside but eventually returns to care for her ailing father after refusing a marriage proposal. While continuing her studies she meets Francesco, a professor with whom she falls profoundly in love. But WWII wreaks havoc in Rome, with bombings by the Allies followed by Nazi occupation. Francesco is deeply involved in the anti-fascist movement, and after they marry, Alessandra, sensing Francesco doesn’t love her as much as the cause, risks her life to gain his affection. Reflecting on her restlessness and desperation, she remembers something her mother had told her: “I couldn’t get used to a life that was spiritually mediocre or a mediocre love. What good is mediocre love? The street is full of it.” Her descent into despair culminates in an irreversible act of violence. The shocking denouement only adds to the impact of Alessandra’s indelible voice, which made a formative impact on Elena Ferrante, whose afterword cites the novel as one of her “books of encouragement.” De Céspedes’s melancholy testament to a hidden life feels timeless and vital.
