There’s No Turning Back is the third novel by Alba De Céspedes to be published by Washington Square Press/Atria and the second to be translated in English by the highly talented Ann Goldstein. Although this is the third of De Céspedes’ novels to be rediscovered through translation, it is an early work, published prior to the two other English translations. Originally published as Nessuno torna indietro by Mondadori in 1938, the novel depicts the lives of eight women all of whom find themselves living in a residence run by nuns in Rome called Grimaldi.
There’s No Turning Back spans the years 1934-1946, and examines the experiences of each of these eight women at various stages in their lives. The hardships and the successes come through as world experiences that feel as relevant now as they did nearly one hundred years ago. In fact, given the current world order being remade as I write this, one could say that nothing has changed and that everything has changed, and that the plight of women, including their freedom to exist in the same way as men, may be the same as one hundred years ago. All of which makes There’s No Turning Back more powerful and perhaps more relevant today than it was in 1938.
Each of the eight characters brings her own story into a complex and psychological web that simultaneously intersects and disengages at various points in the text. The search for the female self is the central theme holding the narrative together.
The novel begins in the following way:
As the nun read the last words of the evening prayer, an indolent chorus of girls responded: “Amen.” Silence followed, veined with impatience. Some of the girls stared, transfixed, as the lighted tapers on the alter, others turned toward the back of the chapel, waiting for a sign from the Mother Superior to release them. Eager to leave, they didn’t even talk to one another. Soon afterward they filed out, two by two; in a compact column, they crossed the wide hall, where daylight lingered on the opaque glass of the front door. (1)
The opening signals a group speaking and moving in one voice and motion. Soon the narrative begins to fracture and the reader gets to know, little by little, each of the eight girls and their stories. DeCéspedes never really spends much time on the girls as a group, other than to demonstrate how those girls navigate the group dynamic. Instead, we are shown how each, individually, comes to maintain an existence that is at times collective and others independent. In each case, the search for an autonomous identity is negotiated against the social norms of the time.
What is revelatory about De Céspedes’ writing is the nature with which she demonstrates an uncanny ability to experiment all the while being successful in the suspension of our disbelief. Perhaps this is because we are now twenty-first-century readers, used to the once shocking characteristics of modernism and its reactionary movement, postmodernism. De Céspedes writing is revolutionary, but in this text, she is still experimenting with form and content when we compare it to her other books.
Ann Goldstein’s translation is flawless. She brings across the beautiful style of the De Céspedes’s writing in a way that is also in tune with the original Italian. In one particularly striking scene, Goldstein’s translation weaves together the feminine themes of the novel from the point of view of Sister Lorenza:
In the night silence, Sister Lorenza listened to the ceaselessly pelting rain; the bed’s white curtains separated her from the world, confining her at an unreachable distance. Before, her sisters’ tents had been next to hers. From the day she was named Mother Superior she had understood what it meant to be a nun; until then she had felt united with other women—the only difference was the black coif on her head. She had never regretted her freedom, and now, instead of thinking of the Ligurian village where she was born, she felt an acute desire to run barefoot on the beach, gather the beautiful rainbow-colored shells, swim with the sun in her face. (207-208)
The beauty of these sentences demonstrates Goldstein’s almost uncanny ability as a linguistic alchemist. As such, the reader can enter the narrative’s poetic moments that are as enriching in English as they are in Italian.
Moreover, the quote above also demonstrates the loneliness and sacrifice that women at a certain time were forced to make. Things have changed but given the textured history of female sacrifice, and Sister Lorenza’s particular sacrifice of her life to God, we can draw striking parallels between the habited nuns and the girls living with them who are also searching for an identity, but separate and free-standing. The novel’s message may be about where we begin and how we develop into the people we eventually become, especially women. It’s also about where the reader begins to come to grips with their own experience and their own encounters with the textuality of identity and lives, global and local.
There’s No Turning Back is an interesting early novel, and if one reads carefully one can detect the ways in which De Céspedes is searching for a voice. This is not to say that the novel is flawed, or even disappointing as an early novel. Instead, it gives the reader a profound introduction into the themes and style De Céspedes would later develop as a more mature writer. The novel can be difficult, and it often jumps from narrator to narrator, leading the reader astray from the flow of the narrative and struggling to catch up. Again, this is not necessarily a criticism, as the novel does offer us a deeper understanding of the author’s overall project. In other words, it might be better if the reader takes this novel as part of a wider project that encompasses all her novels. It’s a piece of a greater mosaic that looks at the role of women in mid-twentieth-century Italy as a microcosm for female identity and struggles on a timeless world stage.
Brava, signora De Céspedes.
De Céspedes, Alba. There’s No Turning Back. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2025.
Andrew Martino is Dean of the Glenda Chatham & Robert G. Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University where he is also professor of English. He has published on Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Luigi Pirandello, among others. He is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today, and is currently finishing a manuscript on Paul Bowles.