What is Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon about?

Every family has its own language: the phrase someone's grandmother always used, the joke nobody outside the house understands, the word that means something only to you. Ginzburg's insight was that this private vocabulary could carry a whole family history, and she built a book out of it. Published by Einaudi in 1963, Lessico famigliare won the Strega Prize the same year.

What it is about

The book follows the Levi family, Ginzburg's own, through three decades in Turin. At its centre is her father, Giuseppe Levi, a histologist who dominates the household and coins his own irritable, whimsical words for his children's failings. Around him are her lighthearted mother, Lidia, her siblings and a stream of friends and visitors.

Rather than telling the story as a conventional memoir, with Ginzburg herself at the centre, the book is built from dinner-table talk: the songs, nicknames and sayings the family used, repeated across the years until they became a kind of shared code. There are no chapters, but the book moves through the years before, during and after the war. Through those phrases you come to know everyone.

The history in the background

The years the book covers include the fascist period and the Second World War, and the family's life was deeply affected. The book records, among other things, the persecution of Jews in Italy, the death in custody of Ginzburg's husband Leone Ginzburg, and the death in 1950 of the writer Cesare Pavese, a family friend. Reviewers single out her restraint. History arrives through domestic life, often seen sideways, and grief is told in an understated way that makes it land harder.

Why it reads so modern

• It is about voice. Long before social media taught everyone to notice how people talk, Ginzburg built a book entirely around speech patterns and family idiom.
• The self steps back. She is present, but she does not make herself the heroine. The focus stays on the people around her.
• It is funny. The early family scenes are full of exclamations and running jokes, and the comedy sits right next to the sorrow that follows.
• It is plain. The style is clear and unadorned, which keeps it fresh decades later.

If you enjoy writers who make the ordinary feel enormous, this is a book you will press on friends.

Which translation?

There are three English versions. D. M. Low's appeared as Family Sayings in 1967 and was revised in 1985; Judith Woolf's appeared as The Things We Used to Say in 1999; and Jenny McPhee's, titled Family Lexicon, was published by NYRB Classics in 2017. McPhee's was singled out by judges of an American Literary Translators Association prize, and it is the one we would reach for. The title matters less than you might think: all three are trying to capture the same untranslatable idea of a family's private language.