Family Lexicon

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines & rituals, crazes, pet phrases, & 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 & 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 & world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family & language—& about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception & 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, & people are all real.” 

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Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) was born Natalia Levi in Palermo, the daughter of a Jewish biologist father & a Catholic mother. Natalia married Gabriele Baldini, an English professor, in 1950, & spent the next 3 decades in Rome, London, & Turin, writing dozens of novels, plays, & essays. Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon) won her the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963 & La famiglia Manzoni was awarded the 1984 Bagutta Prize. From 1983-1987, she served in the Italian parliament as an Independent (prev. the Communist Party), where she dedicated herself to reformist causes, including food prices & Palestinian rights.