A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.
A new translation of a 1952 novel by Italian Cuban author de Céspedes traces the radical impact that writing down her thoughts has on the life of a woman in her 40s.
When Valeria Cossati isn't at work, she dedicates all her time to her family, which includes a slightly older husband and two children who are studying law at a university in Rome, where they all live in a cramped apartment. One Sunday morning in November, when Valeria goes out to buy cigarettes to surprise her husband, who's sleeping in, she's drawn to a display of notebooks in the window of the tobacco shop. She can't resist picking up one of the “black, shiny, thick” notebooks. The owner sternly informs her he is forbidden to sell anything but tobacco on Sundays—and then hands her a notebook to slip inside her coat. Once home, she wildly looks for a place to hide it, afraid that her family will laugh at her for keeping a diary when she has such a humdrum life. Over the next six months, as she restlessly moves the notebook from one hiding place to another, she begins to stay up late and neglect her household duties to write down her previously repressed thoughts about her stale marriage, her fraught relationship with her daughter, her worries about her unmotivated son, and her blossoming romantic feelings for her boss. “For the first time in twenty-three years of marriage, I'm doing something for myself,” she writes. De Céspedes deftly charts the widening gap between Valeria's increasingly desperate inner life and the roles she feels forced to play in a feminist novel that consistently calls into question the ways its narrator makes sense of her claustrophobic domestic world.
A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-662-60139-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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