Feminist Themes: Ten Favourite Books

In this themed post for April, I have chosen ten favourite books strong on feminist themes. In these books, the women yearn for independence, to break away from the conventional roles of marriage and motherhood, to focus on creative pursuits, to rise from the depths of obscurity, to challenge, question or fight against societal constraints placed on them, and to live on their own terms.

So without further ado, here are the ten books. Barring one, you can read the detailed reviews on the rest by clicking on the title links…

BASIC BLACK WITH PEARLS by Helen Weinzweig

Here is the intriguing blurb from NYRB Classics – “Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley to Toronto, the last place she wants to go.”

Told from Shirley’s point of view, it quickly becomes clear that things are not what they seem, and we are left with a narrative that is surreal and disorienting, but all in a good way. Is this then a straightforward espionage tale or something deeper and complex? Weinzweig’s idea for this multi-layered novel was inspired by the Canadian artist Michael Snow’s Walking Woman sculpture series – the concept of a one-dimensional woman moving nowhere.

MY DEATH by Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is a wonderfully uncanny, subversive tale of artists and creativity, identity, and the erasure of women in the world of art.

A writer by profession, we are told how our unnamed narrator has lost her mojo for conjuring up stories, especially since her beloved husband, Allan’s death. Utterly adrift but realising the need for change, she sets up a meeting with her agent Selwyn in Edinburgh. On the appointed day, our narrator visits the National Gallery where a painting stops her in her tracks. Titled “Circe” and painted by the artist W.E. Logan in 1928, we learn that Logan’s muse for this painting was the young art student Helen Ralston who, flattered by Logan’s interest in her, leaves America to study art in Glasgow. Our narrator is suddenly inspired to write a biography on Helen Ralston about whom not much is known or written, and is pleasantly surprised to learn that Ralston is still alive albeit quite old.

However, when the meeting between the creator and her subject takes place, things take a peculiar, unsettling turn, when uncannily the lives of Helen Ralston and our narrator begin to intertwine…

MARY OLIVIER: A LIFE by May Sinclair  

Published in 1919, but set in the late 19^th century, May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life is a delicate and restrained portrayal of a woman’s struggle for selfhood and fulfillment, an exploration of her inner consciousness, while also brilliantly depicting her complicated relationship with her mother, her longing for intellectual pursuits, and the burden of being bogged down by family tragedy and societal expectations.

Autobiographical in tone, the book is divided into five sections – Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Maturity, and Middle Age – charting Mary’s life right from her childhood to the years when she is approaching fifty and in many aspects mirrors much of Sinclair’s own life. The Oliviers are a dysfunctional family, and we learn how Mamma, a strict Catholic, is openly critical of Mary, of her lack of religious fervor, and always contemptuous of Mary’s bookish leanings. The father is a tyrannical figure, particularly in the way he treats his sons, while Mary’s brothers are also a disturbed lot struggling for independence and to break away from the shackles of family ties.

By turns, heartbreaking, poignant, intelligent, introspective, and wise, Mary Olivier brilliantly touches upon myriad themes such as complex families, mothers and daughters, solitude and independence, fear and madness, the tussle between religion and philosophy, the tension between duty and personal fulfillment, the restricted roles for women in Victorian and Edwardian England, and the mysterious passage of time.

HER SIDE OF THE STORY by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Jill Foulston) 

After the resounding success of Forbidden Notebook, Her Side of the Story is another excellent novel by Céspedes – ambitious, intense, richly layered but also longer at 500 pages.  Packed with astute observations, this is an absorbing internal drama of a deeply conflicted woman complete with her memories, reflections, turmoil, hopes, and frustrations. It’s a story that records her path to self-awareness as it satisfyingly hurtles towards a Ginzburg-reminiscent ending.

For Alessandra, our protagonist, the crux of her story is her unhappy marriage to Francesco Minelli, but to get to that core she feels it necessary to give the reader a flavour of her childhood, her upbringing, and the neighbourhood she grew up in. We learn of Alessandra’s adoration of her mother Eleanora trapped in a tumultuous marriage to a man they both despise, and which leaves scars on both women. When she grows up into a young woman herself, Alessandra marries Francesco, but her fate disturbingly begins to blend with that of her mother, although it must be said that while Eleanora falls out of love with her husband, Alessandra remains passionately and perhaps frustratingly devoted to Francesco. Set against a background of days leading up to the Second World War, the war itself, the rise of resistance, the fall of Mussolini, and the signing of the armistice, Her Side of the Story explores an array of themes centred on the stifling stronghold of patriarchy, the net it casts over the relationships between men and women ensnaring them in its fold, the concept of romantic love, feminism, alienation and also increasing resistance.

THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer (Translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)

This is a powerful book about survival, self-renewal, and the capacity to love. While holidaying in an Alpine hunting lodge, our unnamed narrator wakes up one day to an unimaginable catastrophe. She is possibly the last living person although she is yet to grasp the significance of this.

Against such a terrifying backdrop, the bulk of the book is all about how the narrator fights for survival and ekes out a living in the forest. The deep bond that she forms with her coterie of animals is very sensitively portrayed and is one of the highlights of the book. And there are some wonderful passages on existentialism and the meaning of life, love and caring, and the evolution of the physical and metaphysical selves. Ultimately, the narrator’s strength of will to forge ahead is what makes the book so beautiful.

COLD NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD by Tezer Özlü (Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely)

Cold Nights of Childhood, then, is an unflinching portrayal of a woman’s quest for independence, freedom, sex and love, as well as her struggles with mental illness told in a writing style that is cinematic and impressionistic without conforming to the rigid structures of conventional storytelling.

At barely 70 pages and set between 1950 and 1970, the novella is divided into four chapters and begins with a flavour of our narrator’s childhood and school years in the Turkish town of Fatih. Later, we move on to the time our narrator spends in Istanbul and Ankara, and abroad in Europe’s great capital cities (Berlin and Paris). We learn of her string of lovers, her unsuccessful marriages, and above all her incarceration in mental asylums. This predominantly forms the essence of the book, and yet the narrative is not as linear as it seems. Moody, evocative, teeming with rich visuals and a palpable Jean Rhys vibe, Cold Nights of Childhood is a beautifully penned novella that I’m glad to have discovered. 

MRS CALIBAN by Rachel Ingalls

Mrs Caliban is a tale of the disintegration of a marriage, love and sexual freedom, grief and loss, friendship and betrayal, and the re-invention of a woman having hit rock bottom. Our protagonist is Dorothy, a housewife residing in the suburbs of California stuck in a stagnant, loveless marriage. With the unexpected death of their son, Scotty, during a routine operation as well as a miscarriage thereafter, Dorothy is tormented by grief and despair. Her relationship with Fred has reached a breaking point. Resentment brews between the two as they silently blame each other for these twin tragedies. The sense of hopelessness has reached a stage where both are too tired to even divorce. And so they stumble along…staring into an uncertain future.

When one day, Larry, the frogman, lands in Dorothy’s kitchen, her life alters unexpectedly and in ways she has not imagined. The reader immediately senses the perceptible shift in Dorothy’s circumstances; a chance for excitement, love, and adventure…

What makes Mrs Caliban unique is not just its unusual premise but also how rich the novel is in terms of themes explored. Within the broader strange outline of its plot, the novel has an interior logic all its own. Mrs Caliban is a testament to Ingalls’ excellent storytelling ability in the way she blends the fantastical with the mundane to greater effect, and on the strength of her assured writing, the reader is willing to be led along in whichever direction she takes us. 

THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT by Elena Ferrante (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

When Olga’s husband Mario suddenly decides to opt out of their marriage, her life turns upside down, and so begins her downward spiral into depression and neglect.

What stands out in The Days of Abandonment is Olga’s voice – she is brutally frank in conveying her thoughts and feelings, minces no words, and is almost always angry, sometimes uncomfortably so. At its core, the novel touches upon the themes of how absurd conventional definitions of womanhood can be, while also highlighting the trials of motherhood. 

LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner  

Lolly Willowes is a wonderful tale of a single woman looking to lead an independent life by breaking away from the controlling clutches of her family. Till her late twenties, Lolly is shown to lead a pretty sheltered life in the country where her father has a brewing business and an estate called Lady Place. But once she is in her mid-forties, Lolly feels trapped and stultified and longs for a change. During one of her shopping trips, she chances upon a flower shop and learns of a village in the Chilterns called the Great Mop. Soon she begins poring over books and maps on the place. It’s a region that tickles her fancy and on a whim, she decides to establish herself there and live independently.

The first half of Lolly Willowes proceeds conventionally as Lolly sinks into domestic routines both at Lady Place and in London, her role in both these houses being taken for granted. It’s in the second half that the novel slips into a bit of whimsy and magic as ‘witches’ come into play, but it’s all quite charming, and more importantly, Sylvia Townsend Warner pulls it off. Not only does Lolly refreshingly choose to defy conventional societal roles, but the novel is also a statement that even in the mid or late forties, it is never too late for a woman to entirely change her course of life if she really wants to.

THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin

First published in 1899, The Awakening is a remarkable book and is widely seen as a landmark of early feminism. Set in Louisiana, Edna Pontellier is married to a conservative New Orleans businessman. Feeling increasingly stifled by the conventional role of a housewife, the dull existence of a society woman, and the demands of motherhood, Edna yearns for freedom. Until one day she meets Robert Lebrun and is floored by his devotion towards her. Their passionate, furtive encounters unleash in her the desire to chart a new life for herself and pursue her passion for art.

It’s a beautifully penned novel that encapsulates Edna’s inner thoughts as she struggles to find a balance between her duties as a wife and mother, and her newfound path of independence. Gender roles and societal constraints as well as a woman’s need for solitude and finding time for herself are some of the central themes explored in this unforgettable book.

And that’s it! I plan to write more such themed pieces in the future so watch this space.

Two Months of Reading – January & February 2024

In terms of reading, 2024 started slow, but in terms of quality, the total of seven books I read in January and February were top-notch, so no complaints.  Of these books, three were part of Kim’s #NYRBWomen24 reading project (I’m thrilled to participate again) and they were excellent, while the rest were a return to some of my favourite women writers. Four of these were translated works, equally divided between Russian and Italian, while in terms of publishers, NYRB Classics stood out.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links.

EARTHLY SIGNS: MOSCOW DIARIES, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva (Translated from Russian by Jamey Gambrell)

Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries (1917-1922) by Marina Tsvetaeva is a fascinating selection of the celebrated Russian poet’s diaries and essays depicting the harshness of her existence during the horrendous Moscow famine post the 1919 Revolution as well as her poetic musings and thoughts on a variety of topics which showcase an author with a singular way of perceiving the world around her.

As the title indicates, these prose pieces focus on the years between 1917 and 1922 just days after the Russian Revolution and the widespread famine thereafter. We see her struggling to survive, as finding food daily becomes an insurmountable challenge. She is outspoken, often blurts out the wrong things, and with no qualifications to speak of struggles to find or sustain jobs that can support her and her young daughters financially. But despite the grimness of the situation, many of these pieces are laced with mordant wit and piercing observations. To be honest, I didn’t always understand everything that I read, particularly in the later pieces, but much of the material here is rich, vivid, and powerful, and I’m glad to have been introduced to her work.

HER SIDE OF THE STORY by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Jill Foulston)

After the resounding success of Forbidden Notebook, Her Side of the Story is another excellent novel by Céspedes – ambitious, intense, richly layered but also longer at 500 pages.  Packed with astute observations, this is an absorbing internal drama of a deeply conflicted woman complete with her memories, reflections, turmoil, hopes, and frustrations. It’s a story that records her path to self-awareness as it satisfyingly hurtles towards a Ginzburg-reminiscent ending.

For Alessandra, our protagonist, the crux of her story is her unhappy marriage to Francesco Minelli, but to get to that core she feels it necessary to give the reader a flavour of her childhood, her upbringing, and the neighbourhood she grew up in. We learn of Alessandra’s adoration of her mother Eleanora trapped in a tumultuous marriage to a man they both despise, and which leaves scars on both women. When she grows up into a young woman herself, Alessandra marries Francesco, but her fate disturbingly begins to blend with that of her mother, although it must be said that while Eleanora falls out of love with her husband, Alessandra remains passionately and perhaps frustratingly devoted to Francesco. Set against a background of days leading up to the Second World War, the war itself, the rise of resistance, the fall of Mussolini, and the signing of the armistice, Her Side of the Story explores an array of themes centred on the stifling stronghold of patriarchy, the net it casts over the relationships between men and women ensnaring them in its fold, the concept of romantic love, feminism, alienation and also increasing resistance.

OTHER WORLDS: PEASANTS, PILGRIMS, SPIRITS, SAINTS by Teffi (Translated from Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler & Others)

Teffi’s Other Worlds is a beguiling, evocative collection of stories immersed in the world of fairytales and folklore but laced with her intelligence, wit, and psychological acuity; haunting, ethereal stories filled with house spirits and bathhouse devils, she-wolves and shapeshifters, mermaids and monks.  

We begin with “Kishmish”, a wonderful story that starts with sinister overtones and ventures into droll territory capturing a young girl’s inner conflict, her spiritual crisis, and ruminations on how to turn into a saint. “Solovki”, one of my favourites in the collection, is a haunting mood piece about an unhappy marriage, redemption, and spiritual fervor set on a remote island where a group of pilgrims travels annually to visit its monastery. “Leshachikha” is a story about female forest spirits, sibling rivalry, and favouritism, while in “Yavdokha”, an illiterate rustic woman, gets a letter about her son, who is away fighting on the front, and heartbreakingly misunderstands what is communicated to her. In “The Dog”, a story about love, loyalty, bohemianism, and war, the spirit of the narrator’s childhood friend who labels himself her dog comes to her rescue in a moment of crisis. 

The stories in Other Worlds conjure up images of a bygone, faded Russia. These are stories about religion, occult, age-old customs and superstitions, and the supernatural drawing on ancient folklore from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus but infused with the touch of the modern as they dwell on the realism of timeless human emotions. It’s a wondrous tapestry of stories where the mythical and otherworldly elements are skillfully interwoven into themes of unrequited love, unhappy marriages, family politics, and upstairs-downstairs drama among others.

A JEST OF GOD by Margaret Laurence

Set in the little, fictional prairie town of Manawaka, Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God is a wonderfully intense and haunting novel, an incredible character portrait of a shy, socially awkward schoolteacher capturing her solitary life, her life-altering affair and the ensuing crisis thereafter.

Our protagonist is Rachel Cameron, a 34-year-old single woman living with her ailing, overbearing mother in the Canadian town of Manawaka. As the years pile on, and the prospect of finding a man and bearing children appears increasingly dim, she feels trapped in her role as a daughter, a sister, and a teacher, unable to break free from the expectations placed upon her by others. Enter Nick Kazlik, a university professor one year older than her, and very soon Rachel finds herself entangled in a passionate affair, one that will affect her deeply and possibly set her on a path of self-discovery. 

A Jest of God explores the themes of loneliness and fear, sexuality and desire, faith and religion, the courage to break away from conventional societal mores essentially those forced upon women, and the small-mindedness of a conservative small town where nobody’s business goes unnoticed providing rich fodder for gossip and judgment. It’s about the complex ties between mothers and daughters, and between siblings, and also between friends and lovers. But, it’s also about the unfathomable tricks of Fate (lending the novel its name), particularly on a woman whose greatest fear is being made to look like a fool.

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD by Barbara Comyns

“The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows” is the arresting opening line that greets us as we are immediately pulled into the deliciously peculiar world of Comyns. A massive flood has inundated this small village leaving destruction and chaos in its wake. We are told that the hens “locked in their black shed, became depressed and hungry and one by one they fell from their perches and committed suicide in the dank water below, leaving only the cocks alive”, and as Ebin Willoweed paddles his children to safety on his boat, they observe the carcasses of dead animals floating by. Steadily, we are introduced to an assortment of odd characters that form the nucleus of this tale, at the heart of which lies the dysfunctional Willoweed family. 

As the narrative unfolds, a series of bizarre and tragic events befall the village. The floods at the beginning are just the tip of the iceberg, very soon, a mysterious and contagious disease begins to afflict the villagers and animals alike. This inexplicable disease spreads rapidly and no one knows who the next victim will be, although there’s a sense that it will come to roost in the Willoweed house eventually. A unique blend of comedy and tragedy, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, then, offers a piercing commentary on society, mortality and morality, power dynamics, and relationships laced with Comyns’ trademark off-kilter vision.

MARY OLIVIER: A LIFE by May Sinclair  

Published in 1919, but set in the late 19^th century, May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life is a delicate and restrained portrayal of a woman’s struggle for selfhood and fulfillment, an exploration of her inner consciousness, while also brilliantly depicting her complicated relationship with her mother, her longing for intellectual pursuits, and the burden of being bogged down by family tragedy and societal expectations.

Autobiographical in tone, the book is divided into five sections – Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Maturity, and Middle Age – charting Mary’s life right from her childhood to the years when she is approaching fifty and in many aspects mirrors much of Sinclair’s own life. The Oliviers are a dysfunctional family, and we learn how Mamma, a strict Catholic, is openly critical of Mary, of her lack of religious fervor, and always contemptuous of Mary’s bookish leanings. The father is a tyrannical figure, particularly in the way he treats his sons, while Mary’s brothers are also a disturbed lot struggling for independence and to break away from the shackles of family ties.

By turns, heartbreaking, poignant, intelligent, introspective, and wise, Mary Olivier brilliantly touches upon myriad themes such as complex families, mothers and daughters, solitude and independence, fear and madness, the tussle between religion and philosophy, the tension between duty and personal fulfillment, the restricted roles for women in Victorian and Edwardian England, and the mysterious passage of time.

 VALENTINO AND SAGITTARIUS by Natalia Ginzburg (Translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni)

In both Valentino and Sagittarius, we see Natalia Ginzburg in full form; she’s just brilliant at writing about families laced with her trademark dry wit, effectively capturing the simmering tension between an assortment of flawed characters.

In Valentino, our narrator, Caterina, is a young woman, training to be a teacher and living with her parents and her brother Valentino in a small rented apartment in the middle of town. We learn how Valentino is an utterly spoiled man and the cynosure of their parents’ eyes on whom they have pinned all their hopes for the future. The family’s circumstances are poor, but Valentino who is studying medicine, has a penchant for luxury and idle pursuits, marked by expensive tastes and a hunger for the finer things in life. This level of extravagance lies outside the ambit of the parents’ meager income, but they oblige him at the cost of neglecting Clara and Caterina. And then, one day, he decides to marry Maddalena, a woman considerably older than him and quite ugly. The family is shocked and the stage is set for conflicts and heartaches.

In Sagittarius, a dark tale of deceit and trickery, the narrator’s mother is a brash, opinionated, overbearing, and chronically dissatisfied woman, who craves a vibrant intellectual and artistic life but is overtly critical of her family. Fed up with the boredom and drabness of village life, the mother moves to the city hopeful of being at the centre of a rich cultural and intellectual milieu and opening her own art gallery, a dynamic space that will attract the who’s who from the city’s artistic and literary circles. And yet, despite this fresh start, the mother remains deeply dissatisfied. The creative and artistic people that she wishes to meet are strangely nowhere to be seen, and the days just stretch before her, endless and empty. Until one day, at the parlour, she strikes up a conversation with the vague but charismatic Priscilla Fontana, also known as Scilla; a questionable friendship that ominously spells doom for the mother.

That’s it for January and February. In March, I’ve been reading The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro and I’m drawn into its swirling sentences and intense, dreamlike vibes. Plus I’ve started Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn which already feels like a different kind of Pym – sad but tender and beautifully written.  In the second half of March, I also plan to join in for Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin as part of #NYRBWomen24.

Valentino and Sagittarius – Natalia Ginzburg (tr. Avril Bardoni)

I am gradually but happily making my way through Ginzburg’s wonderful array of novels and novellas with much more to look forward to; on this blog, I have reviewed Family Lexicon, The Dry Heart, and All Our Yesterdays so far – three books varied in terms of length but top-notch in terms of quality. To this trio, I am glad to now add Valentino and Sagittarius, a collection of two novellas and a superb one at that.

In both Valentino and Sagittarius, we see Natalia Ginzburg in full form; she’s just brilliant at writing about families laced with her trademark dry wit, effectively capturing the simmering tension between an assortment of flawed characters.

VALENTINO

We first begin with Valentino, a compact novella of failed relationships, overbearing generosity, extravagance, unrealistic expectations, favouritism, and dashed hopes.

Our narrator, Caterina, is a young woman, training to be a teacher and living with her parents and brother in a small rented apartment in the middle of town. This brother is none other than Valentino, an utterly spoiled man and the cynosure of their parents’ eyes on whom they have pinned all their hopes for the future (“My father believed that he was destined to become a man of consequence”). The family’s circumstances are poor – the father is a retired school teacher, the mother gives piano lessons, and Caterina’s elder sister Clara is married to a man who is barely making ends meet. What with their reduced income and an army of three children, Clara has turned into a bitter, resentful woman uninterested in aiding her parents and siblings.

Valentino, meanwhile, is studying medicine but burdens the family with seemingly never-ending expenses. He has a penchant for luxury and idle pursuits, marked by expensive tastes and a hunger for the finer things in life. This level of extravagance lies outside the ambit of the parents’ meager income, but they oblige him at the cost of neglecting Clara and Caterina, truly believing that he is destined to become a great man. Clara and Caterina have no such illusions though; they see him for what he is, an unremarkable man and a spendthrift.

My father spent his days in the kitchen, dreaming and muttering to himself, fantasizing about the future when Valentino would be a famous doctor attend medical congresses in the great capitals and discover new drugs and new diseases. Valentino himself seemed devoid of any ambition to become a man of consequence; in the house, he usually spent his time playing with a kitten or making toys for the caretaker’s children out of scraps of old material stuffed with sawdust…

If Valentino is ambivalent about his career, he adopts a similar attitude in his romantic liaisons. His string of affairs with pretty, young women turns out to be transitory failing to transform into something meaningful. And then, one day, he introduces his family to Maddalena, a woman he has decided to marry. The family is shocked; Maddalena, older than him and quite ugly, is a sharp contrast to the slew of women Valentino dated previously. 

But Maddalena is a hardworking, enterprising woman with a set of farms that she owns and runs. She is also wealthy, and soon she undertakes to support the family financially despite the family’s resistance, although Valentino is more than happy to splurge and live off his wife’s wealth. As soon as they marry, Valentino’s habits barely change and he remains as flippant as ever. He neglects his studies, lounges about in their spacious home, devotes himself to dressing up lavishly, and aimlessly whiles away his time often in the company of his friend Kit, a well-meaning but thoroughly untidy bachelor. Soon, Maddalena compels Caterina to stay with them in their big house, and the stage is set for conflict, maybe a flicker of hope, and heartaches.

Valentino also explores the themes of loneliness and unhappiness and effectively captures the double-edged sword of wealth and comfort and its impact on independence and autonomy. This is particularly epitomized in the character of Maddalena, whose oppressive generosity lifts the family out of their strained circumstances, but in some sense makes them uncomfortably beholden to her. Then, Clara despite being contemptuous of Maddalena’s affluence, has no qualms about turning to her for financial support when one of her children falls ill.  Caterina’s independence is also clipped in a way when she starts living in Maddalena’s house despite the abundance of comforts.

The women in Valentino are a disillusioned lot paving the way for bitterness and alienation. Clara and her family struggle to keep heads above water, while Maddalena begins to get increasingly frustrated with Valentino’s waywardness and disinclination towards a serious career. Even Caterina is mostly a lonely woman – the lone bright moment in her sad life is that one day when she and Kit go on an errand to a village to look for a suitable maid, reveling in the languor and splendour of their surroundings, an oasis of calm and a respite from her otherwise clamorous life largely filled with the din of Valentino and Maddalena’s quarrels.

The girl was out working in the fields and we had to wait for her to return. We sat in a small, dark kitchen and the girl’s mother gave us a glass of wine and some little wrinkled pears. Kit chatted away rapidly in dialect to the woman, praising the wine and asking a hundred and one detailed questions about the work on the farm. I sat sipping my wine in silence, my thoughts gradually becoming blurred: the wine was very strong and all at once I felt happy to be in that little kitchen with the open fields beyond the windows and the taste of wine on my tongue…

Things begin to get darker as this sharp, emotion-packed novella hurtles towards its conclusion, but Caterina is forced to make peace with the fact that despite its myriad challenges and imperfections, family ultimately trumps everything.

SAGITTARIUS

In Sagittarius, a dark tale of deceit and trickery, the narrator’s mother is a brash, opinionated, overbearing, and chronically dissatisfied woman, who craves a vibrant intellectual and artistic life but is overtly critical of her family. A widow initially settled in the village of Dronero, the mother has a sufficient income to support herself and her elder daughter, Giulia, a beautiful, dreamy woman whom the mother constantly berates for being dull and listless. Fed up with the boredom and drabness of village life, the mother decides to move to the city and buys a house on a loan from her sisters while keeping them in the dark about the money already in her possession. By moving to the city, the mother is hopeful of being at the centre of a rich cultural and intellectual milieu conversing on a range of topics on art, literature, and poetry. She harbours ambitions of opening her own art gallery, a dynamic space that will attract the who’s who from the city’s artistic and literary circles.

But the mother is not the only one who has to grapple with this transition and begin life anew. Along with her comes an entourage – her maid Carmela, a sullen girl homesick for Dronero, her niece Teresa’s 11-year-old daughter Costanza, and Giulia newly married to an older man Dr Chaim Wesser, a marriage that deeply disappoints the mother. On the strength of Giulia’s beauty, the mother has high hopes of her elder daughter making a rich match and Giulia almost comes close but is left heartbroken, and those hopes quickly fritter away. Sickly in health, her marriage to the doctor seems convenient, a man who woos Giulia by reading literature and poetry to her, although Giulia does not care much about either, so the mother says. Dr Wesser, a generous doctor but with barely any income, readily agrees to accompany them and live under his mother-in-law’s new roof.

Newly establishing herself in the city also allows the mother to drop in on her younger daughter (our narrator), hitherto completely ignored. Our narrator shares a flat with an older female friend and is more studious and intellectually inclined than Giulia, but the mother leaves no stone unturned in criticizing aspects of her life too.

Despite this fresh start, the mother remains deeply dissatisfied. The creative and artistic people that she wishes to meet are strangely nowhere to be seen, and the days just stretch before her, endless and empty. Until one day, at the parlour, she strikes up a conversation with the vague but charismatic Priscilla Fontana, also known as Scilla. Displaying the gift of the gab, Scilla encourages the mother’s plans of an art gallery (to be called Sagittarius) and proposes a partnership. As she effortlessly boasts of having important connections, Scilla promises to introduce the mother to all the right creative people. But these meetings mysteriously and perhaps ominously never materialise.

It’s not that the mother doesn’t realise that something is amiss. For a woman who is allegedly well-connected, Scilla lives in a drab apartment block situated amid endless stretches of bleak fields and filled with unsettling canvas paintings (“We looked at livid, elongated heads of indeterminate sex with little crosses for eyes and metal grills for mouth”).

Ah yes, said my mother, this was modern art. So many people failed to understand it, but she understood it; her only criticism was that these paintings seemed rather sad, they reminded her of a prison; but the bar motif was probably due to the influence of this area, which was maybe a little gloomy and reminiscent of a prison with all those high buildings that suggested prisons and barracks and was surrounded by such a desolate tract of open land. But Signora Fontana disagreed with my mother about the area which, she said, was really not gloomy at all; we should see it in the spring when the grass was covered with wild anemones; she would wake up in the morning to the tinkle of sheep-bells, and would take her palette and brushes and paint outside sitting on the grass.

It looks like Scilla hasn’t much money herself, but so effective are her persuasive skills and so lonely is the mother in an unfamiliar city that the mother just accepts Scilla’s on-the-spur explanations ignoring those ominous warning signals. Meanwhile, we are also introduced to a slew of people that form part of Scilla’s life – her financially struggling ex-husband Gilberto, her young daughter Barbara who becomes close friends with Giulia, Barbara’s wealthy, jealously over-protective, and misogynistic fiancée Pinuccio whose strange, conservative family disapprove Barbara, and last but not the least is the enigmatic and seemingly phantom Valeria expected to help kick start their venture.  

Sagittarius, then, is an absorbing, unflinching novella of questionable friendships, misplaced confidence, tumultuous families, and tattered dreams once again displaying Ginzburg’s flair for astute observations.  It is a marvellous character study of a woman, whose outward persona of supreme overconfidence belies the stark reality of her actual ignorance. So sure she is of her lofty ambitions and her sense of entitlement that the mother is unable to accept that her daughters might want to wish for a different kind of existence, one that doesn’t necessarily align with her unrealistic expectations. Forever judging people based on their appearance, the mother is naively unaware of the dark undercurrents that lace their personalities, setting her down the path of doom and failure.  As this absorbing novella races towards its finale peppered with fascinating but anxiety-inducing moments, the denouement when it comes is unforgiving and deeply sad and it is Ginzburg’s mastery at characterization that elicits a faint trace of sympathy from the reader for a character who has been nothing short of unlikeable.

Everywhere the little fawn coat had flitted, the yellow shock of hair blown in the wind; it seemed an age to my mother since the yellow bob had fluttered beside her shoulder, as distant in time as the years of happiness seem to one who has fallen on evil times, as the games of childhood seem when we are on the point of dying. It had been a happy time, but now she had to cancel it from her memory: it had brought nothing but dust and ashes, and dust and ashes leave no regrets behind.

OVERALL VIEWS: THEMES, VOICE, CHARACTERIZATION, AND WRITING STYLE

Ginsburg excels in casting her gimlet eye on the intricacies of family relations with her touch of acerbic, mordant humour bringing out the conflicts and complications of familial bonds with a masterful economy of language. A common thread running through both Valentino and Sagittarius is the depiction of working-class families, as well as the presence of domineering, ambitious women whose dreams are ground to dust. Then there are the varied men in their lives (whether husbands, friends, sons, or sons-in-law) who consistently disappoint them in love and money. There is something hilarious and tragic about her characters as they try to navigate the restricted contours of their daily lives while also dreaming and hoping for either fame and money and the glamour of the limelight, or a tranquil and calm existence and the solace of the shadows.

In terms of narrative voice, both novellas are interestingly told by the youngest daughters in an impassioned, detached style as if they are observing the events unravel from a distance, although they are often embroiled in the ensuing mayhem and can’t completely extricate themselves. We also see the characters grapple with a drastic change in their circumstances – poverty versus wealth in Valentino, rural versus urban in Sagittarius – a sort of fissure that adds meat to the storytelling. Another wonderful pair of novellas from Natalia Ginzburg then, she’s quickly becoming one of my favourite authors.

Mothers & Daughters in Literature: Eight Excellent Books

One of my favourite themes in literature is mother-daughter relationships, all the more if they are complex or difficult. I’m currently reading May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life for #NYRBWomen24, which has been a wonderful read so far, particularly exploring the complicated relationship between Mary and her deeply religious mother, and it got me thinking of some of the other books I’d recently read and loved on this theme.

So without further ado, here are the eight books. You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links…

A JEST OF GOD by Margaret Laurence

Set in the little, fictional prairie town of Manawaka, Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God is a wonderfully intense and haunting novel, an incredible character portrait of a shy, socially awkward schoolteacher capturing her solitary life, her life-altering affair and the ensuing crisis thereafter.

Our protagonist is Rachel Cameron, a 34-year-old single woman living with her ailing, overbearing mother in the Canadian town of Manawaka. As the years pile on, and the prospect of finding a man and bearing children appears increasingly dim, she feels trapped in her role as a daughter, a sister, and a teacher, unable to break free from the expectations placed upon her by others. Enter Nick Kazlik, a university professor one year older than her, and very soon Rachel finds herself entangled in a passionate affair, one that will affect her deeply and possibly set her on a path of self-discovery. 

A Jest of God explores the themes of loneliness and fear, sexuality and desire, faith and religion, the courage to break away from conventional societal mores essentially those forced upon women, and the small-mindedness of a conservative small town where nobody’s business goes unnoticed providing rich fodder for gossip and judgment. It’s about the complex ties between mothers and daughters, and between siblings, and also between friends and lovers. But, it’s also about the unfathomable tricks of Fate (lending the novel its name), particularly on a woman whose greatest fear is being made to look like a fool.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

There’s a scene in Forbidden Notebook where Valeria Cossatti, our protagonist and the narrator, is having lunch with her glamorous friend Clara at her place, a penthouse apartment in Rome. Divorced from her husband, Clara is now an independent woman and a successful filmmaker, but by then Valeria’s position has become much more complex. Her outward façade continues to be that of a traditional woman confined to the role of a homemaker and catering to the needs of her husband and two children, but inwardly Valeria has begun to seethe and resist these conventional norms she is expected to adhere to. Clara believes that Valeria has been lucky to achieve all that she wanted by marrying, but by then Valeria and the reader know the reality to be entirely different – Valeria has been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment, a feeling she is unable to share with Clara.

It is this intense conflict, growing resistance, and the dual nature of her thoughts and emotions that forms the essence of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook – a rich, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. Set in 1950s Rome, not only does the book boldly challenge the validity of restrictive, orthodox roles thrust upon women, and the heartaches of motherhood, but it also dwells on writing as a powerful tool for a woman to find her voice and be heard when those closest to her fail to do so.

Billed as a feminist classic, Forbidden Notebook is a masterclass of insight and imagination, brilliant in the way it provides a window into a woman’s interior life, an internal struggle that oscillates between the desire to discover her true self and also keep it hidden. 

DADDY’S GONE A-HUNTING by Penelope Mortimer

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is a brilliant, superbly crafted tale of a challenging marriage, abortion, and the difficulties of a mother-daughter relationship told in Mortimer’s customary haunting, absorbing style.

We are introduced to Ruth Whiting, a bored housewife who lives with her well-to-do dentist husband Rex, a bully, in the posh neighbourhood called the Common. Ruth dotes on her children – her eldest daughter Angela and the boys, Julian and Mike. But they are growing up and have reached that age where they have lives of their own – the boys away at boarding school and Angela, an undergraduate at Oxford. In the holidays, when her children come down, Ruth’s home is filled with chatter, activities and noise, but for the better part of the year, the hours lie empty and the monotonous days stretch endlessly before Ruth.

When Angela, who is unmarried, becomes pregnant, she confides in Ruth expecting the latter to help her. The gamut of conflicting emotions felt by mother and daughter and how they deal with this tough situation forms the backbone of this novel.

COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW by Jessica Au

Cold Enough for Snow is a haunting, beautifully sculpted novella of the mysteries of relationships and memories, familial bonds, finding connections, and life’s simple pleasures. The novel opens with a woman and her mother embarking on a short trip together to Japan, a journey and destination that promises the opportunity for both to bond and connect. But we get a sense from the outset that mother and daughter are not always on the same page.

What’s interesting about this novella is the nature of the relationship between the two women, which remains elusive despite the hazy impression that they get along well. The book is largely from the daughter’s point of view and so the mother’s reminisces and flashbacks are told to us from the daughter’s perspective lending it an air of unreliability or conveying the idea that the mother’s experiences are filtered through the daughter’s eyes so that it fits her narrative.

There’s an elusive, enigmatic feel to the novella, of things left unsaid that might mean more than what’s been stated, a sense that things lie outside our grasp, that full knowledge is always on the fringes, on the periphery of our vision. To me Cold Enough for Snow was like a balm – the quiet, hallucinatory prose style and range of sensory images were very soothing and I could easily lose myself in the dreamy world that Au created.

ELENA KNOWS by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle)

Elena Knows is a forceful, thought-provoking, unconventional crime novel where Claudia Piñeiro effectively explores a range of social concerns such as illness, caregiving, crippling bureaucracy and a woman’s choice regarding her body. Elena, a woman in her sixties, suffers from Parkinson’s, a progressively devastating illness, characterized by loss of control over everyday movements. However, the real burden weighing heavy on her soul is the sudden, recent death of her daughter Rita who was mysteriously and inexplicably found hanging from the bell tower in the local church. The police classify her death as suicide, but Elena is convinced it is murder.

What makes Elena Knows so compelling is the richness of themes explored, a gamut of hard-hitting social issues. First of all, the book is an unflinching portrayal of a debilitating disease and the loss of dignity that it involves. Other themes explored are the challenges of being a caregiver and abortion. It’s a brilliant novel and the fact that the author manages to address these issues without being preachy or sentimental only enhances the book’s power.

MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley

My Phantoms is a brilliant, engrossing tale that explores the complexity of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Our narrator is Bridget Grant and through her eyes, we gradually begin to see a fully formed picture of her narcissistic father Lee and her emotionally detached mother Helen – parents who have continued to haunt Bridget’s psyche. The relationship with the mother forms the focal point of the novel, she is independent living in her own home, but portrayed as an insecure woman on many fronts and unable to really open up. However, we view the mother from Bridget’s eyes, and even if she is not someone you warm up to, Bridget is not always the ideal daughter either and comes across as cruel and deeply unsympathetic in certain situations.

Riley’s prose is biting and as sharp as a scalpel, but also suffused with tender moments. The primary characters are finely etched and the dialogues between them are superb, they feel very real. In My Phantoms, then, she explores the tricky terrain of fractured familial bonds with much aplomb.

IZA’S BALLAD by Magda Szabó (Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes)

On the death of her husband Vince, Ettie goes to live with her daughter Iza in her flat in Budapest. Ettie is ecstatic at first, she looks forward to spending quality time with her beloved daughter, but alas things unfold quite differently. The first days of adjustment in the big, bustling city of Budapest are particularly hard for Ettie who has spent most of her time in a village taking comfort in its familiarity and sense of community. Pest frightens her, and with Iza too immersed in her career and social life, Ettie’s sense of isolation only heightens.

One of the biggest strengths of the novel is Szabó’s superb characterization. Ettie and Iza are such brilliantly etched, fully realised characters, and Szabó particularly excels in showing how their diametrically opposite personas and outlook set the stage for heartache and tragedy. The two are as unalike as chalk and cheese. Ettie is warm, Iza is frozen. For Ettie the past is an anchor, while Iza is forward-thinking, her gaze settled on the future. Ettie craves companionship, Iza wants to be alone. Iza’s Ballad, then, is a piercing, unflinching examination of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, a striking depiction of two women who are poles apart. 

THE MIRADOR: DREAMED MEMORIES OF IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY BY HER DAUGHTER by Élisabeth Gille (Translated from French by Marina Harss) 

The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.

The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future.

Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; The Mirador is not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence.

And that’s it! I had fun compiling this post, and watch this space for more such themed pieces in the future. Happy reading!

Her Side of the Story – Alba de Céspedes (tr. Jill Foulston)

One of the highlights of my reading last year was Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a stunning, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. It found a place on My Best Books of 2023 list, and I was excited that another novel of hers was to be soon published – Her Side of the Story.

Alba de Céspedes’s ambitious, intense, richly layered almost 500-page novel is called Her Side of the Story for a reason. A reason that is, interestingly, revealed to us only on the last page. Interesting because while we do know right from the beginning that this is the protagonist Alessandra Corteggiani’s story (she is the narrator), we do not know why she has chosen to look back on her past and write her account. Moreover, why is it ‘her’ side of the story? Are there different versions then and is she compelled to set the record straight?  

For Alessandra, the crux of her story is her unhappy marriage to Francesco Minelli, but to get to that core she feels it necessary to give the reader a flavour of her childhood, her upbringing, and the neighbourhood she grew up in. We are introduced to Alessandra’s mother Eleanora, a dreamy but deeply disillusioned woman and a talented concert pianist married to Ariberto Corteggiani, a man with country roots from Abruzzo. Right from the beginning Alessandra feels the burden of being born to her parents, a couple mired in tragedy the origins of which begin with the death of Alessandra’s older brother Alessandro, an infant who drowns in a freak accident, and a tragedy from which Eleanora hasn’t entirely recovered. Eleanora loves her daughter but the ghosts of her son continue to haunt her to the point that even Alessandra begins to feel his presence in her body especially when she is drawn towards acts of wickedness.

Living in a building in the Prati neighbourhood, the Corteggianis barely make ends meet, Alessandra’s father has a job, but Eleanora is compelled to work as well mostly as a music teacher to young students aspiring to become musicians but with no talent whatsoever. What with her uninspiring job and the daily grind of household chores, Eleanora feels trapped and claustrophobic. She harbours dreams of becoming a world-famous concert pianist but poverty, limited circumstances, and the rigidity of patriarchal norms prove stifling leaving no room for her creativity and talent to flourish.

What’s also not lost on Alessandra is how utterly mismatched her parents are. Eleanora’s statuesque figure and frail beauty are enough to make heads turn but given her love for literature, music, and culture, her personality is at odds with that of her husband who remains quintessentially uncouth and disrespectful of women. He is good-looking though and while physical desire had a role to play in their union, Alessandra cannot bring herself to face this fact about her parents although it lingers on the fringes of her consciousness.

Eleanora does find some respite in female friendship that refreshingly breaks the monotony of her days. Lydia, a vivacious, outspoken woman entangled in an affair with a married man is enamoured by Eleanora, her beauty, and her otherworldliness. By association, her daughter Fulvia and Alessandra strike up a tentative friendship as well even though Alessandra mostly grows up as a solitary child, content in her aloneness. Alessandra adores Eleanora who half-heartedly tries to steer her daughter away from her dream world and the idea of intellectual pursuits aware of their futility in a male-dominated world. But Alessandra is not deterred and mother-daughter silently gang up against the father, a man they begin to deeply abhor. During solitary evenings, when her parents are not yet home, Alessandra and their devoted maid Sista, spend the time wrapped in veils of fear, afraid of the perils that might befall Eleanora.

When Eleanora is offered the position of a music teacher to a serious, self-aware young girl of a wealthy family residing in the sprawling Villa Pierce, it seems like a change in fortune and an opportunity to finally sparkle, but it’s a position that could also disrupt her life. There she meets the girl’s elder brother Hervey, a musical genius and a conscientious objector, and embarks on an affair. To Alessandra, Villa Pierce is a mythical, magical place brought alive by her mother’s account of the time she spent there, and in Hervey, Eleanora finds a man whose intellectual and cultural tastes are aligned with her own. She even considers leaving her husband to be with Hervey although she can’t think of abandoning Alessandra, and anyway, Ariberto thwarts that attempt.

They came home when the house was dark, the children asleep, and the day over-spent, finished. Once more they took off their jackets, sat down by the radio, and listened to political debates. They never had a thing to say to the women, not even “How are you feeling? Tired? What a pretty dress you’re wearing.” They never told stories, didn’t enjoy conversation or jokes, and hardly ever smiled. When a man spoke to his wife, he’d say, “You all do…,” “You all say”…. lumping her with his children, his mother-in-law, the maid-all of them lazy, spendthrift, ungrateful people.

Yet they had been engaged for a long time, as was traditional with middle-class southerners. The young men had waited hours and hours just to see their beloved come to the window, or to follow when she went for a walk with her mother. They’d written passionate letters. It was not uncommon for girls to wait many years before getting married, since it was difficult to find a secure job and save enough money to buy furniture. They would wait, preparing their trousseau, and trusting in the hope of love and happiness. Instead, they found life draining-the kitchen, the house, the swelling and flattening of their bodies as they brought children into the world. Gradually, beneath an appearance of resignation, the women began to feel angry and resentful about the trap they’d been lured into.

After her mother’s death (the reader knows this from the outset), Alessandra is sent to Abruzzo to live with her father’s family, members whom she had never met before. She meets her grandmother Nonna, a stoic, strong-willed woman as well as an assortment of aunts and uncles who conform to the dictates of Nonna as she runs the household with an iron fist. Being an old-fashioned family where patriarchy rules the roost, Alessandra resists their influence. Seeing something of her own strength and will in Alessandra, Nonna tries to get her to accept the conventional mores of marriage and motherhood, but Alessandra rebels professing her desire for education and independence. In Uncle Rudolph, she finds an ally; he encourages her studies often defending her choices when challenged by Nonna.

In her own way, Alessandra develops a fondness for the countryside which calms her clamorous mind although increasingly the atmosphere soon gets tarnished by the growing rumblings of war.

In the morning, I often saw squadrons of planes in the sky over the mountains: shiny, metallic, buzzing. The buzzing pierced my ears like a drill; that buzzing, yes, was unbearable because of the clear determination it expressed. The planes crossed the azure skies quickly, decisively, and, as they passed, the birds, of course, fled. The sun was reflected with an evil glare on their open wings, and the peace of the countryside was tarnished. In the enclosed valley, the din of the engines demanded an echo from the sleepy mountainsides. The earth shook, the trees trembled, the water in the river rippled with a shudder. As the planes cut across the sun’s rays, they threw a cold shadow over the ground as clouds do before a storm. One after another those shadows passed overhead, causing me to shiver. The hum wiped every picture from my mind, every kind word from my ears.

Alessandra is deeply affected by the plight of the women in her family, their silent suffering, and their hard work involved in raising children and running a household, but consistently underappreciated in their efforts. Soon, Italy enters the Second World War, and their fears only worsen for their husbands, sons, and brothers who would be called out to the front for fighting. Amid this backdrop, Alessandra is compelled to leave and return to Rome when Sista retires to tend to her father who is gradually turning blind.

Ensconced in the city, Alessandra must begin life anew, but this period is filled with exhaustion and alienation as she caters to the demands of her father she detests, while struggling to find the time to study. Balancing both her job and university studies, Alessandra once again finds herself as an outsider but then meets Francesco Minelli, a professor engaged in anti-Fascist activities. The two fall in love, and it seems that Alessandra has finally met the right man, one who respects her and admires her independence. But alas, once they marry, Francesco’s personality is governed by the same patriarchal norms as her father, and ominously her married life begins to mirror that of her mother’s.

Céspedes’s lucid portrayal of Alessandra, the complexity of her thoughts and emotions, is brilliantly done. Intelligent, fierce, and independent Alessandra is cut from a different cloth – she is creatively inclined and solitary like her mother but has the courage and strength of her father’s family. Because she is different from most girls of her ilk who only aspire to marry well, Alessandra often feels like an outsider. She yearns for a rich, intellectual, and independent life, but at the same time can’t quite shake off the conventional status of marriage either. Time and again, the bitter truth is made evident to her that in a strictly conservative Italian society, women have to make a choice – opt for marriage and silently suffer its mounting disappointments or walk down an unconventional path and remain alone. Alessandra’s idealized version of romantic love borders on the obsessive and sets her up for much heartache. Often she finds herself relegated to second place in Francesco’s world, his commitment to the anti-Fascist cause and partisan causes trumps that of his marriage to Alessandra. What’s more, his refusal to treat her as his equal is apparent when he prohibits her from joining the cause when she expresses her desire to do so.

While Alessandra’s marriage to Francesco might form the principal relationship in Her Side of the Story, it is as much about her relationship with her mother as well as her father. A mother whom she adored (“My mother was, for me, the finest example of womanhood. And the steeper the decline of my life, the more humiliating it was over the years, the more radiant her image became”), and her father whom she abhors. As Alessandra’s life unfolds, her fate disturbingly begins to blend with that of her mother, although it must be said that while Eleanora falls out of love with her husband, Alessandra remains passionately and perhaps frustratingly devoted to Francesco. As regards her father, when he turns increasingly blind and comes to depend on her, Alessandra patiently leashes her revenge, tormenting him with tales of her mother’s affair with Hervey often embellishing the story as much as possible to hurt him.

One of the core themes explored in Her Side of the Story is marriage and disillusionment. The women in Her Side of the Story are a disenchanted lot. Disillusioned by the lack of poetry in their lives. Disillusioned by the sameness of their days. But more importantly, disillusioned by how marriage has become a dead-end rather than a springboard to grow or thrive. The idea of romantic love is also central to the story and manifests itself in the root cause of the women’s despondency, how the little acts of tenderness and romance during the days of courtship simply vanish after marriage – the women are consumed by the onerous burden of motherhood and household duties heightening their sense of inadequacy as the men in their lives fail to acknowledge or appreciate the roles forcibly thrust on them by society.

Interwoven with this theme is that of the complexity of womanhood – the relentless internal struggle and raging conflict in the soul – desiring independence and creative fulfillment as much as a happy married life filled with romance and respect. This struggle is epitomized not just in Eleonora and Alessandra’s life but is also reflected in that of Lydia and Fulvia. Alessandra and her mother are unhappy in marriage and so are Lydia and Fulvia involved in a string of affairs but without the promise of commitment. Ironically, Lydia craves the commitment of marriage despite being involved with married men and seeing the unhappiness of married women – their rationale that married men ultimately go back to their wives while their lovers are left in the lurch only accentuates the miserableness of their situation.

The Second World War and the resultant partisan activities gather force in the second half of the novel in a manner reminiscent of Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia and Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays – the omniscient radio that pervades every household, the incessant bombings, and refuge to shelter. Against this backdrop, Francesco and Alessandra must navigate the tricky terrain of resistance with danger just a corner away consumed with fear and uncertainty as regards their future.

Her Side of the Story, then, is an impressive, intricately constructed novel; an artful meditation on an array of themes centred on the stifling stronghold of patriarchy, the net it casts over the relationships between men and women ensnaring them in its fold, the concept of romantic love, feminism, alienation and also increasing resistance. This resistance is both external and internal, dwelling on the active resistance to war, Fascism, and the Germans that directly involves the men and the internal resistance to deep-rooted patriarchy by the women.

Just as in Forbidden Notebook, this novel thrums with Céspedes’ piercing insights on the complexities of being a woman and I found myself marking paragraphs on almost every page. Having said that, while still a brilliant book, it lacks the tautness and narrative energy of Forbidden Notebook not only because of its length but also in the way the story pans out. For me, the most compelling sections of the novel were the exploration of Alessandra’s relationship with her mother and the time Alessandra spends in Abruzzo with her father’s relatives. Where it does occasionally falter is when the focus shifts to her marriage to Francesco; while intensely described, these pages lack the power of the first half of the novel.

Set against a background of days leading up to the Second World War, the war itself, the rise of resistance, the fall of Mussolini, and the signing of the armistice, Her Side of the Story is another excellent novel by Céspedes despite the caveats mentioned above.  Packed with astute observations and the absorbing internal drama of a deeply conflicted woman complete with her memories, reflections, turmoil, hopes, and frustrations, it’s a story that records her path to self-awareness as it satisfyingly hurtles towards a Ginzburg-reminiscent ending.