Family Lexicon by Natasha Ginzburg

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy (it)” Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”

REVIEWS

"The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity."
—Hilma Wolitzer

"The lore of her large, loving, and discordant family provides rich material for Ginzburg’s engrossing autobiographical novel."
—Publishers Weekly

"The atmosphere of the book is so clear and immediate that reading it is like being there or seeing a film."
—The Christian Science Monitor

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1590178386
Pages: 224