Banned in fascist Italy, ‘There's No Turning Back' gets new life
When it was published in Italy in 1938, 'There's No Turning Back,' by Alba de Céspedes, became an instant bestseller and was translated into 24 languages. Not long after, it was banned by the fascist government.
Though it came back into circulation in Europe and had a screen adaptation in Italy, neither the book nor its author received much attention in the United States until recently. In 2016, Elena Ferrante published 'Frantumaglia,' a collection of letters and reflections in which she mentioned Céspedes among the few authors she could read while working on her own novels. This led to a widespread rediscovery. In 2023, an edition of Céspedes's novel 'Forbidden Notebook' (1952), translated by Ann Goldstein (also Ferrante's translator), was published here to rave reviews, as was 'Her Side of the Story' (1949), translated by Jill Foulston.
Italian Cuban activist and author Céspedes (1911-1997) has a deep backlist, and with 'There's No Turning Back,' we are close to its beginning. The book is a coming-of-age novel following a group of eight young women in Rome. They meet at a women's college called the Grimaldi, run strictly by nuns, originally gathering as a study group for literature students. What made the book inflammatory, and what got it banned, is its focus on women's agency in their own complex destinies. As translator, Goldstein explains in her introduction, 'In all her novels de Céspedes investigates women's attempts to both deconstruct and construct their lives and gain a sense of themselves, as she investigated her own life.'
In the novel, this is expressed very directly by Silvia Custo, the most serious student of the group. 'It's as if we're on a bridge,' she tells the others, creating an image that comes up repeatedly. 'We've already departed from one side and haven't yet reached the other. What we've left behind we don't look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don't know what we'll find when the fog clears.'
This notion of unknown and interesting choices about women's futures puts 'There's No Turning Back' at odds with the fascist ideal of the 'sposa e madre esemplare,' exemplary wife and mother. For these young women, motherhood and marriage are more problems than they are goals.
The most man-obsessed, a Spaniard named Vinca, talks to her crush on the phone every night. Emanuela, one of the lead characters, is at the Grimaldi because she's had a baby out of wedlock with a now-deceased soldier. Augusta is the oldest member of the group; she's 'close to forty' and is a prolific aspiring writer. She makes the situation plain to Emanuela: 'Our parents shouldn't send us to the city; afterward, even if we return, we're bad daughters, bad wives. Who can forget having been master of herself? And in our villages a woman who's lived alone in the city is a fallen woman. Those who remained, who passed from the father's authority to the husband's, can't forgive us for having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want. And men can't forgive us for having studied, for knowing as much as they do.'
The most 'fallen' of the group is Xenia, whose parents have mortgaged their vineyard to finance her education. When she fails her first set of exams, she runs away to Milan in despair, but not before stealing an emerald ring from Emanuela's room.
There's a 'Little Women'-style 'Beth' character, coughing on page one; a pair of girls from Puglia, one very wealthy and one not, who become involved in a rather dastardly love triangle and one of whom has a series of sexual fantasies that cannot have been pleasing to the fascist censor: an Indian prince with a pearl quivering on his forehead who 'returned every night, with his gardens, his carpets, his persuasive voice, his hands.' You go, Valentina.
With its imperfect, passionate characters, and its passages of intense analysis of their relationships and their inner lives, Céspedes's novel will appeal to fans of Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading the book in times nearly as chaotic as those in which it was published delivers a kind of subversive pleasure.
Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast 'The Weekly Reader,' is the author of numerous books, including 'First Comes Love' and 'The Big Book of the Dead.'
By Alba de Céspedes, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.
Washington Square Press. 304 pp. $27.99
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