Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes

Author:Alba de Céspedes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

AFTERWORD

WHEN I WAS very young, my goal was to write with a masculine tone. It seemed to me that all the great writers were male, and hence it was necessary to write like a real man. Later, I began to read women’s literature attentively and I embraced the theory that every little fragment that revealed a feminine literary specificity should be studied and put to use. Some time ago, however, I shook off theoretical preoccupations and readings, and began to write without asking myself what I should be: masculine, feminine, neuter. And while I’m writing, I confine myself to reading books that serve not as entertainment but as solid companions. I have a modest list that I call books of encouragement. One of these is Her Side of the Story, by Alba de Céspedes, which is now available as a companion for English-language readers in this wonderful new translation by Jill Foulston.

I first read this novel when I was sixteen years old. As is often the case with books that influence us in our youth, we remember passages according to our needs. I’m talking mainly about the first hundred and fifty pages of Her Side of the Story, which is the story of a mother-daughter relationship and, more generally, a memorable catalogue of relations between women.

When I read those pages for the first time, as a teenager, I liked many things about them, others I didn’t understand, still others annoyed me. But the point is the conflicted reading that developed, the fact that I couldn’t seriously identify with the young Alessandra, the first-person narrator. Certainly I found the relationship between her and her mother, Eleonora, a pianist who is held back by a vulgar husband, very moving. Certainly, in the passages where Alessandra describes her deep bond with her mother, I recognized myself. But her absolute approval of the passion that Eleonora feels for the musician Hervey disturbed me: I mean, rather, that Alessandra’s acceptance of it seemed to me sentimental and improbable, it made me angry. I would have fought a hypothetical extramarital love of my mother’s with all my strength: the mere suspicion kindled my rage, incited my jealousy much more than her definite love for my father. In short, I didn’t understand, I had the impression that I knew more about Eleonora than even her own daughter.

And it was precisely the pages about the dress made for the concert with Hervey that marked the difference between me, the reader, and Alessandra, the narrator. Those pages seemed brilliant to me, and I still love them today, as an important part of a novel that I now perceive to have a great literary intelligence. Let’s look, then, at the story of that dress, whose development is complex. Eleonora has talent as an artist, but, dulled by her role as the wife of a vulgar man, she is diminished, and has the faded appearance of a sensitive, loveless woman. Her mother, Alessandra’s grandmother, also wasted her life: she was Austrian,

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