The Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Cespedes

I love diaries, fiction or non-fiction and I have tried to keep my own journals.  But the trouble is what if someone were to find my diary and read it?  It's probably every diary keeper's fear.  You want to write honestly about what you feel and how your life is going but that often requires writing about others and that's where it gets tricky.  

And that is the dilemma faced by Valeria Cossati the diary writer in Alba De Cespedes's excellent novel Forbidden Notebook (1952).  Valeria is 43 and living in Rome with her family in the early 1950's when Forbidden Notebook begins.  She is a wife and mother.  Her son and daughter are in their late teens.  Both Valeria and her husband Michele work outside the home but money is tight and so all four family members are living together in an apartment with not much privacy.  

Valeria has a full time job in an office but when she comes home another full time job awaits since she does the cooking and cleaning.  And so needing some space for herself Valeria decides one Sunday to buy a diary.  But from the moment she takes the diary home where to hide her journal preoccupies her thoughts.  And the more Valeria writes in her diary the more she questions whether buying it was a good idea: 

It’s two in the morning. I got up to write: I can’t sleep. Yet again it’s the fault of this notebook. Before, I’d immediately forget what happened at home; now, instead, since I began to write down daily events, I hold on to them in my memory and try to understand why they occurred. If it’s true that the hidden presence of this notebook gives a new flavor to my life, I have to acknowledge that it isn’t making it any happier. In the family you have to pretend not to notice what happens, or at least not to wonder about its meaning".

When I began reading Forbidden Notebook I was thinking that it wouldn't be the end of the world if Valeria's husband Michele or their childten Mirella and Riccardo found her journal.  Maybe they should learn that Valeria is a person in her own right and shouldn't be expected to always be at their beck and call.  But the deeper I got into the diary the more it became clear that no Valeria's diary cannot be shared with anyone.  Due to her diary writing she begins to take risks in her life that are not for anyone else's eyes.   The end of the novel is kind of sad but in hindsight it is the only decision Valeria could have made.

Thanks to Sam at Book Chase (please see the link under blogs I follow) for recommending Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Cespedes.  This novel is a gem, a neglected classic of 20th century Italian literature and beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein.  Forbidden Notebook will definitely be on my best books of 2024 list at the end of this year. 

Look For Me There: Greiving My Father, Finding Myself by Luke Russert

I have loved travel memoirs since I was in my twenties and read Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.  And so when I heard about Luke Russert's memoir Look For Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself (2023) I was interested.  Luke Russert is the former Capital Hill Correspondent for NBC news and the son of the legendary journalist Tim Russert who died tragically at age 58 from a heart attack.  

And in Look For Me There, Luke Russert writes about how he had a great job as a correspondent at NBC that he had held for eight years.  But the pressure in competing for the next story or interview combined with the increasing acrimony on Capital Hill began to sour him on a job he had once loved.  

Also Luke had never come to terms with the grief he felt at his father's death.  Tim Russert's death was so unexpected and sudden that Luke started having worries about his own health: 

"I know I’ve suffered from anxiety since my father died. A therapist even confirmed it. Any routine pain or shortness of breath makes me think I’m going to have a heart attack. That I’m going to keel over and flatline just like he did. The feelings intensify during work hours. Breathing techniques help. Beers at night do, too—the irony, of course, being that any hangover only strengthens the anxiety tenfold the next day. I still tremble when I have to go into an audio tracking booth and record a script for a piece. Dad died in a tracking booth".

And so in 2016 at age thirty Luke Russert decided to make a radical change.  He quit his job at NBC in order to travel the world, visiting six continents and Look For Me There is the memoir of his three year odyssey, the countries he visited, the people he met and what he learned about himself along the way. 

Look For Me There is divided into twenty-eight chapters with most of the chapters covering a different country Luke visited.  But solo traveling is lonely and it can be dangerous.  Luke discovers that seeing the next country on your list, visiting the tourist sites, posting pictures on instagram, living in hotels and motels is fine if you do it for a few weeks or even months.  But three years wandering the globe without any real purpose and the excitement and fun diminished fast for Luke and he discovers that wherever you go you take yourself and your issues with you. 

Look For Me There is a travel memoir that people who are feeling lost and don't know what they should do next can benefit from.  And Look For Me There is also a loving tribute from a son to his father.  Tim Russert would be proud.

What I'll be reading thanks to Libby!

I've done my fair share of complaining about how my local library has nothing when I go there to visit.  And then I decided to check out Libby.  It's a reading service that is hooked up to the local libraries in your area and the books you choose are delivered straight to your tablet or laptop computer.  They are sent in audio version or directly to your kindle depending on what you decide. I must be the last reader to discover a service like this and now that I have I am in book heaven!

Listed below, thanks to Libby, are the books I will be reading in the next two or three weeks and the biggest find was Forbidden Notebook (1952) by Alba de Cespedes.  Thanks  for recommending this book Sam!  I have almost finished Forbidden Notebook and it will definitely be on my best book list at the end of this year, a true classic.

And finally, Libby is very easy to sign up for.  All you need is your library card and you type in your card number and you are subsribed and can begin checking out books.  Libby gives you two weeks to read each book.  Some books there is a demand for but often the wait is no more than two weeks and so many quality books are available immediately and there is no charge.  It's a great service!

Happy Reading!

Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom Memories And Recipes From The Great Depression by Clara Cannucciari.

"Times are tough now, like they were when I was growing up.  People need tips and encouragement to survive these thin times, and I'm happy to have a way to help". - Clara Cannucciari.  

For someone who doesn't cook much I have certainly aquired my share of cook books.  But my favorite is Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom Memories And Recipes From The Great Depression (2009) by Clara Cannucciari.  

Clara is best known for her YouTube show:  Great Depression Cooking With Cllara.  She was a 92 year old chef cooking the meals her famiy ate during the 1930's:  Dandelion Salad, Eggplant Burgers, The Lonely Meatball, Pasta With Peas, Pasta With Brocoli, Pasta With Meat (when they could afford it) etc.

Clara's cooking show began in 2007 and ran for a few years.  It was an internet sensation partly because in 2008, 2009, 2010 the country was in a deep recession.  Clara was a comforting presence as she cooked her meals and shared stories about how her family made it through hard times.

Clara Cannucciari passed away in 2013 at the age of 98.  But her cooking show is still on the internet in reruns and we have her book as well.  Both are worth checking out.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford

"The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task". - Richard Ford

Richard Ford is one of America's great writers and I became a fan decades ago when I read his short story collection Rock Springs.  I loved that book, particularly the title story.  I then went on to read The Sportswriter.  It's the first novel in Richard Ford's acclaimed series centering around the life and times of Frank Bascombe.

I enjoyed The Sportswriter but I never bonded enough with Frank Bascombe to continue with the series. As I recall Frank can be very funny in an understated way but at his core there is a sadness to him and I wasn't in the right mood at the time.  But thanks to Richard Ford's moving and beautifully written memoir Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2019) I am reconnecting with an author I have long admired.  

Between Them tells the story of Richard's parents Parker and Edna Ford.  They grew up in Arkansas in the early part of the 20th century.  Their childhoods were not easy and so when they met each other it was a stroke of good luck.  Edna and Parker married young and Richard Ford writes:: 

"All along they wanted children. It was the normal thing. But that simply hadn’t happened. They weren’t sure why. Though it only made them closer—walled out the past and the future both. A suicide for a father and a severe Irish mother can close off a lot. Plus, my mother had had anything but an easy life before going to the nuns. The past for them wasn’t an accommodating site"

Parker and Edna accepted the fact that children were not in their future.  Parker was a traveling salesman throughout the 1930's and Edna travelled with him on his sales trips.  They lived in hotels, became friends with all kinds of people, ate at supper clubs and made a good living.  But most important they were together.  And then in 1944 fifteen years into their marriage Edna got pregnant and Richard Ford their only child was born

There is a sadness to this memoir in that the author does seem to feel that when it comes to his parents they loved him but he was a bit of a third wheel in their lives.  As many have commented the title of the memoir Between Them seems to indicate this.  But is Richard Ford right?  I thought so at the beginning of the book but by the end of this memoir (which is not very long) I wasn't so sure.  

I say this because Between Them is written in two parts.  The first part of the book is Richard Ford's tribute to his father, Parker Ford, and was written recently in 2017.  This section has a more distant quality because Parker Ford died in 1960 from heart failure when Richard was sixteen.  And before his death Richard didn't really know his father well.  Parker was away alot as a traveling salesman and when he came home he didn't communicate his feelings that much.  And we can only imagine the effect on Parker that his own father's suicide when he was a young boy must have had on him.

Part Two is Ford's tribute to his mother and was written in 1981 shortly after her death from cancer.  Edna Ford lived twenty years after her husband.  She never fully recovered from Parker's death but she got on with life.  Edna had a job working in an ER which she liked, made friends, went out to dinner.  She was a big fan of The Dodgers and Richard and his wife Kristina took Edna on trips, visited, had her over and took her to baseball games.  And Edna cared about her son Richard.  As the author tells us, Edna would sometimes pull him aside and ask: 

"Richard, are you happy?” And when I told her I was, she would say in a warning voice, “You must be happy. That’s so important.” Not that she was unhappy, but just that she knew whereof she spoke.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford is a great memoir, 5 stars.  And thank you to Sam at Book Chase (bookchase.blogspot.com) for his very fine review last year alerting me to this book.  It had been my plan for many years to return to reading Richard Ford and Sam's review gave me the push I needed.  And now it's time to dust off my copy of the Sportswriter and give Frank Bascombe another try.

The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman

The Midwife's Apprentice (1991) by Karen Cushman is the third Newbery Award winning novel that I have read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Marg at The Intrepid Reader and Baker.  I have been choosing these Newbery books because they are well written and let's face it relatively short.  But I need to move on soon to adult medieval historical fiction and I plan to do so with my next choice.

But for now it's The Midwife's Apprentice and once again this novel, though written for kids, doesn't sugar coat life in the middle ages, particularly for the poor.  The young heroine of this novel who at the beginning is called Beetle by the sneering villagers has no family or place to live.  She doesn't remember her mother or her father: 

"Someone, she assumed, must have borne her and cared for her lest she toddle into the pond and changed her diapers when they reeked, but as long as she could remember, she had lived on her own by what means she could—stealing an onion here or helping with the harvest there in exchange for a night on the stable floor. She took what she could from a village and moved on before the villagers, with their rakes and sticks, drove her away. Snug cottages and warm bread and mothers who hugged their babes were beyond her imagining, but dearly would she have loved to eat a turnip without the mud of the field still on it or sleep in a barn fragrant with new hay"

Beetle is about 12 or 13 when the book begins and she sleeps wherever she can find shelter, scavenges for food.  It's a dangerous existance and Beetle's situation was probably the life most orphan kids lived throughout much of history.  But then Beetle's luck changes when she meets a midwife, Jane Sharp, who decides to take her in as an apprentice.  But the midwife is not a motherly figure.  Jane is mean and constantly ridicules Beetle.  But working for the midwife gives Beetle food and a place to stay and then one day at the county fair Beetle has a wonderful time and it's a turning point in her life:

"What a day! She had been winked at, complimented, given a gift, and now mistaken for the mysterious Alyce who could read. Did she then look like someone who could read? She leaned over and watched her face in the water again. 'This face,' she said, 'could belong to someone who can read. And has curls ... And this is me, Beetle.' She stopped. Beetle was no name for a person, no name for someone who looked like she could read. Frowning, she thought a minute, and then her face shone as though a torch were fired inside her 'Alyce,' she breathed. Alyce sounded clean and friendly and smart. You could love some- one named Alyce. She looked back at the face in the water. 'This then is me, Alyce.' It was right". 

The newly named Alyce goes on from there and despite her hard beginnings she has a good heart.  She rescues a cat from a group of bullies and the cat becomes her loyal companion.  Alyce also finds a home for a six year old orphan boy named Edward.  And she begins a friendship with a young boy named Will who is indebted to Alyce for saving his life.

I liked the book well enough.  It's well written but of the three Newbery winners I have read this year my favorite continues to be Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz.

Now In November by Josephine W. Johnson

"Now in November I can see our years as a whole. This autumn is like both an end and a beginning to our lives, and those days which seemed confused with the blur of all things too near and too familiar are clear and strange now. It has been a long year, longer and more full of meaning than all those ten years that went before it. There were nights when I felt that we were moving toward some awful and hopeless hour, but when that hour came it was broken up and confused because we were too near, and I did not even quite realize that it had come.

In 1935 Josephine W. Johnson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Now In November.  I had never heard of this novel or author but the plot, a family trying to survive on a farm during the Great Depression, interested me.  It's an era I have always been curious about and maybe overly romanticized with images of people finding inventive ways of cooking and saving and the lessons that can help us today.  But reading Now In November is an eye opener as to what life was really like during the Great Depression and there was nothing romantic about it.

Now in November is set on a farm in the Midwest in which the Haldmarne family: father, mother and their three daughters, Kerrin, Marget and Merle try to survive a season of drought. The daughters are very different.  Kerrin the eldest has a fiery temper.  The youngest daughter Merle in comparison has an inner peace that Marget admires.  Marget the middle daughter is the worrier and also a thoughtful and observant narrator:

"And then it came to me as it did at times when the woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for, that maybe they wouldn’t be always ours—that a drouth or a too-wet year or even a year over-good when everyone else had too much to sell—could snatch them away from us, and a scratch on a piece of paper could cancel a hundred acres and all our lives" 

Now In November encompasses one fateful year in the life of this family and what they go though which is considerable.  I had so many passages underlined that it was hard to know what to share.  Marget has so much to tell us not only about farm life but about the toll that looming poverty can tale on a family or on anyone.  Is it safer therefore to live without too much hope.  Marget wrestles with these questions which are just as relevant today.

The Pulitzer comittee knew what they were doing in 1935 when they awarded Josephine Winslow Johnson their highest honor.  Now in November is not a light read. There is tragedy and heartbreak in this novel but alot to reflect upon as well.