Domestic conflict as bombs rain down on fascist Italy

FICTION HER SIDE OF THE STORY

Alba de Cespedes Pushkin Press, €23

Pushkin Press continues its revival of the Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Cespedes, who has been championed by Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri, in publishing her 1949 novel Her Side of the Story, following last year’s acclaimed appearance of the also long out-of-print Forbidden Notebook.

Her Side of the Story is a more conventional novel about a Roman girl Alessandra growing up in 1930s fascist Italy. A smart, strong-willed, subversive teenager who blooms into a courageous, progressive young woman, she refuses the “sordid destiny” of domesticity; de Cespedes writes with an unsentimental, unsparing, impassioned view of what it means to be a woman.

What’s striking is how the important figures in Alessandra’s life – usually domineering, outsize characters – gradually drift into shadowy forms at differing stages of her distinct, and at times difficult, maturity.

Initially it appears she overcomes or banishes them: the haunting presence of her brother who drowned; a demeaning and saturnine father who feels no affinity to the women in his life; a rural grandmother possessing both grandeur and grit who relates to Alessandra spiritually but not in her modern ideas; a lonely benevolent uncle, and her future husband.

A professor older and seemingly wiser than men Alessandra’s age, he promises a felicitous love and stimulating future, until that fades in a fog of domestic life that suffocates her as much as the backdrop of aerial bombardment.

The person she cannot overcome though is her mother, Eleonora, a chimerical and musical figure, who longs for a fulfilling life beyond her dreary marriage. This relationship between mother and daughter is the strongest part of the novel; empowering one another’s existence, it’s a beautiful waterfall of a mother’s wishes flowing into Alessandra’s deep well of ambition.

The literary figures they reference cause alarm, however; we know things won’t end well.

What’s more, the novel does not finish well in a general sense, which is a pity as there is much to like: de Cespedes’s way of writing memory to make the past present, and womanhood being the focus for a change of a protagonist. Yet it feels overlong and the final arc loses its fizz even with a romantic action-driven plot, the war and Alessandra partaking in anti-fascist activity.

It involves the most intimate strand of her story as well, falling in love and marriage, but the resolution of this proves unsatisfying.

De Cespedes closes the story like a door slammed shut on a life full of promise. Then again, that could have been her intention.