Family Lexicon

Name: Family Lexicon
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Natalia Ginzburg
ISBN: 9798765012765

Author: Natalia Ginzburg, Jenny McPhee

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 8 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/28/2023

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Women, History

Synopsis

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."

About Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born Natalia Levi in Palermo, Sicily, the daughter of a Jewish biologist father and a Catholic mother. She grew up in Turin, in a household that was a salon for antifascist activists, intellectuals, and artists, and published her first short stories at the age of eighteen; she would go on to become one of the most important and widely taught writers in Italy, taking up the themes of oppression, family, and social change. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, a prominent Turinese writer, activist, and editor. In 1940, the fascist government exiled the Ginzburgs and their three children to a remote village in Abruzzo. After the fall of Mussolini, Leone fled to Rome, where he was arrested by Nazi authorities and tortured to death. Natalia married Gabriele Baldini, an English professor, in 1950, and spent the next three decades in Rome, London, and Turin, writing dozens of novels, plays, and essays. Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon) won her the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963 and La famiglia Manzoni was awarded the 1984 Bagutta Prize. From 1983 to 1987, she served in the Italian parliament as an Independent (having left the Communist Party), where she dedicated herself to reformist causes, including food prices and Palestinian rights.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Carolyn Marie on April 29, 2025

These stories explore the complexities of love, family, and relationships, which (as someone who finds strong characters and deep emotions very interesting) I thoroughly enjoyed. Natalia Ginzburg’s writing felt fresh and vivid. The characters in these two novellas were full of life and passion. I lo......more

Goodreads review by Baz on June 15, 2024

Ginzburg’s a favourite I’ve read and written about before, not long ago, and I loved these two works for the same reasons I’ve loved the others, so I ain’t gonna say much. I had a brief exchange in a DM with someone, and I’m stealing his descriptors for Ginzburg. He said ‘piercing’ and he said ‘diam......more

Goodreads review by Dave on January 15, 2022

Maybe it's not about the haunting specter of aging and death but the cats we adopt along the way.......more

Goodreads review by Michela on August 18, 2018

Fin dalle prime pagine ci rendiamo conto di essere immersi in una narrazione frammentaria, che si compone di accadimenti modesti e discontinui, registrati quasi con oggettività, e di dettagli sparsi e apparentemente banali, un cappotto malridotto, una frangia nera, una brutta lampada di carta. Picco......more

Goodreads review by Kate on August 22, 2011

Family is the book that Jonathan Franzen probably wishes he was writing when he was writing Freedom. This is my first Ginzburg novel (or rather, novellas - there are two)and I would like to refrain from making general statements about the rest of her oeuvre, but will anyway: Ginzburg's project, it......more