Family Lexicon

By Natalia Ginzburg

Book Overview

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."

• Format: MP3 CD
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CJTG9XW2
• ISBN13: 9798212561594
• Release Date: March 2023
• Publisher: Tantor Audio

Customer Reviews

A family history in hearing

This is a very rich story of the family of Natalia Ginzburg. It is written in an unusual way. And much of the text consists in her citations of what other family members have said. It tells the story of her family in Turin, and goes up through her adult life. It is also unusual in that she does not really give her opinion of anything or anyone directly, or probe deeply into herself in any way. In the brief preface she makes it clear that she is engaged in an act of exact remembering. And she says that she has used all the names , the real names of the people in the story. The two major characters are her parents, the father who is Jewish by origin by not by religious practice, is a scientist and engineer. He is a lover of mountaineering, and a man who seems to have no idea of how to make or deal with money. He is violently opinionated, and his outbursts are one central strand in the memoir. The mother is a different soul entirely, a happy person by nature whose best friend is Ginzburg's older sister, but who brings a tone of understanding to all her five children. The story is of the five siblings also, and their eventual careers and marriages. And it is also of the extended family. And in the latter part of the book there is a lot about anti- Fascist activity of family and friends. The work has a kind of authenticity that comes not only from the ' sayings' but from its matter- of- fact descriptive and objective tone. The problem with this, and I feel with Ginzburg's voice in the work is that it is not personally deep enough, and not somehow loving enough. But again there is a texture of great richness, a feeling that what is being described is a whole world. And then too there are so many incidents and events, so many happenings that the reader has a sense of seeing life ' as it really happens'. This work gives a great deal. There is a certain sense however, and perhaps I am wrong here, of it somehow not getting to the deepest depth , of its holding aloof from where the heart is. One great example is the way Ginzburg talks of her first husband. She speaks of him as if he were just another character in the whole story. Nonetheless the reader of this review should know that my review does not begin to touch upon the many characters, events and true complexity of the work. This is a worthwhile and meaningful book. I highly recommend it.

Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare

Ginzburg's Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings in English) is one of the most beautiful, sad, funny, touching, powerful novels of the twentieth century. It focusses on what its title says it focusses on -- the little sayings, catch-phrases, that every family has, that make up the family lexicon, and that her family had an abundance of. Just out of focus, beyond the brightest light of the narrative, are the events of the times -- the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the Mussolini racial laws. In between are the family's experiences -- births, deaths, marriages -- and characters -- her parents, siblings, friends, husband. The seemingly inessential turns out to have great import, and the incredible understatement that results from not focussing on great events paradoxically gives those events an overwheliming reality.