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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
There are books that sit with you quietly, like a relative who never raises their voice but somehow commands the whole room. Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon is one of them. It doesn’t demand your attention but earns it, page by page, voice by voice, until the house is full, and you’re sitting in the middle of it all, listening.
This is a memoir, sure. A family chronicle. But it reads like a long, continuous breath: a recounting of names, sayings, arguments, dinners, political conversations, and idle grumblings, each rendered in simple, bone-true prose. It’s a tapestry made of everyday threads, and what a marvel that it never unravels.
What Ginzburg captures here isn’t just the chaos of familial intimacy but the private language that binds people to one another - the recycled idioms, the half-jokes that outlive their punchlines, the things that are always said and never explained. It’s about Italy, yes, and fascism, and anti-fascism, and exile and fear, but it’s also about how a father clears his throat before he speaks, or what a sister refuses to say. The personal and political live side by side here, as they always do in real life.
There’s something slyly radical in how the book unfolds. Without dramatic arcs or moral declarations, Family Lexicon resists the conventions of both fiction and memoir. Ginzburg doesn’t shape the past to teach us anything neat. She presents it as it was: contradictory, fragmented, human. The social commentary is all the more powerful for how unadorned it is. It's anti-fascist resistance that doesn't arrive with speeches and banners, but rather shows up in who’s missing from the dinner table, in whispered anxieties, in the everyday courage of carrying on.
Reading Family Lexicon reminded me at times of The Anthropologists: that same subtle ache, that same glimpse into a world made up of tiny, unremarkable moments that somehow feel monumental. There’s a peculiar joy in that kind of storytelling. You don’t realize how deeply you’ve sunk into it until the book ends and you feel like someone’s just turned out the kitchen light.
A five-star read, no question. Quietly luminous. This is the kind of book that teaches you how to listen. And maybe how to remember.
This is a memoir, sure. A family chronicle. But it reads like a long, continuous breath: a recounting of names, sayings, arguments, dinners, political conversations, and idle grumblings, each rendered in simple, bone-true prose. It’s a tapestry made of everyday threads, and what a marvel that it never unravels.
What Ginzburg captures here isn’t just the chaos of familial intimacy but the private language that binds people to one another - the recycled idioms, the half-jokes that outlive their punchlines, the things that are always said and never explained. It’s about Italy, yes, and fascism, and anti-fascism, and exile and fear, but it’s also about how a father clears his throat before he speaks, or what a sister refuses to say. The personal and political live side by side here, as they always do in real life.
There’s something slyly radical in how the book unfolds. Without dramatic arcs or moral declarations, Family Lexicon resists the conventions of both fiction and memoir. Ginzburg doesn’t shape the past to teach us anything neat. She presents it as it was: contradictory, fragmented, human. The social commentary is all the more powerful for how unadorned it is. It's anti-fascist resistance that doesn't arrive with speeches and banners, but rather shows up in who’s missing from the dinner table, in whispered anxieties, in the everyday courage of carrying on.
Reading Family Lexicon reminded me at times of The Anthropologists: that same subtle ache, that same glimpse into a world made up of tiny, unremarkable moments that somehow feel monumental. There’s a peculiar joy in that kind of storytelling. You don’t realize how deeply you’ve sunk into it until the book ends and you feel like someone’s just turned out the kitchen light.
A five-star read, no question. Quietly luminous. This is the kind of book that teaches you how to listen. And maybe how to remember.
medium-paced
Reading this book, I thought of all the things my family and I, and my friends and I, say—the special language you guard with the people you love—and I felt joy.
Not only have I been blessed with incredible people in my life, but I also get to create and shape a unique language with them—whether it’s my parents, my brother, my cousin, my best friend, my close friends, the guy I’m seeing, or the lady who prepares my cappuccino each morning. This language, born from our shared thoughts and experiences, is ours alone, something no one outside could truly understand. It feels almost as if our language forms a shield, protecting us.
Language is everything. Freedom is everything.
My people are everything.
Not only have I been blessed with incredible people in my life, but I also get to create and shape a unique language with them—whether it’s my parents, my brother, my cousin, my best friend, my close friends, the guy I’m seeing, or the lady who prepares my cappuccino each morning. This language, born from our shared thoughts and experiences, is ours alone, something no one outside could truly understand. It feels almost as if our language forms a shield, protecting us.
Language is everything. Freedom is everything.
My people are everything.
Léxico familiar é aquele livro que mais do que ler você precisa degustar. De forma alguma ele poderia ser livro como se fosse uma maratona ou apenas para fazer volume. É preciso ir lendo e apreciando tudo o que ele representa. A obra vai muito além de descrição de fatos históricos ou literários, é uma viagem afetiva, um mergulho na memória de uma filha mais nova, uma escrita humana... Natalia, a autora, vai entrelaçando as memórias familiares com o pano de fundo político e social da Itália fascista e do pós-guerra de forma majestosa. É o tipo de livro que pede uma leitura lenta ou você pode esquecer de contemplar a grandiosidade dele.
Natalia Ginzburg, tem uma maneira muito peculiar de escrever, nos fazendo ver através de suas memórias como as coisas eram belas, apesar dos pesares. É a beleza do cotidiano mesmo em tempos difíceis. Achei maravilhoso ler sobre a juventude, sobre a família, sobre a vida dessas pessoas... Saber as manias e as opiniões do pais, da mãe e das pessoas que de fato existiam. E vez ou outra somos agraciados com a menção a algum nome hoje muito famoso, mas que na época eram só amigos da família.
Gostei bastante desse livro!
Natalia Ginzburg, tem uma maneira muito peculiar de escrever, nos fazendo ver através de suas memórias como as coisas eram belas, apesar dos pesares. É a beleza do cotidiano mesmo em tempos difíceis. Achei maravilhoso ler sobre a juventude, sobre a família, sobre a vida dessas pessoas... Saber as manias e as opiniões do pais, da mãe e das pessoas que de fato existiam. E vez ou outra somos agraciados com a menção a algum nome hoje muito famoso, mas que na época eram só amigos da família.
Gostei bastante desse livro!
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
As I grow older, I notice in myself the tendency to record things from the past, to put memories on paper, to look at old photos and keep them. Not out of nostalgia (at least I think so), but out of an undefined fear that something of value would be lost. That value is of course primarily for myself, but also the feeling that the ‘little life’ I have led, the environment in which I grew up, and the environment in which I later built my life, nevertheless have a certain ‘universal’ value, say something about human life in general. That sounds pretentious, I know, but doesn’t that tie in with the individual view in which and to which we are all riveted?
I suspect that something similar drove the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) to put this lexicon on paper and publish it. The title does indeed speak of lexicon, and not chronicle or autobiography, and that is telling. It is striking that this book is made up of mostly short sentences spoken by her family members and acquaintances, typical turns of phrase that characterize a person, a milieu, or a time. That immediately indicates the antiquarian quality of this book. Because it is striking how ‘impersonal’ this book seems: Ginzburg describes and records, and hardly shows any emotion. Even the death of her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, in a prison of Mussolini’s fascists, is simply mentioned, almost in passing. We hardly hear anything about Natalia herself, and the development she went through. And with the exception of a few passages, she does not devote a single letter to philosophical, political or literary reflections.
No, instead, this book is a coming and going of characters, with the frenzy father (eventually becoming a bit of a caricature of himself) and the constantly mothering mother as pivots, and around them brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, in-laws, acquaintances and friends, … sharply drawn (especially through the short sentences they utter), but absorbed in sometimes banal actions and discussions.
In a sense, but not entirely, you can compare this with the much later “Les années”/The Years by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, which describes her own life and the successive periods of time from an impersonal point of view. I must say that Ginzburg's book, despite the fact that she herself remains largely out of the picture, still feels a bit more personal. It’s a warm, sympathetic reconstruction of a special (although essentially petty bourgeois) family in a special era (especially the dictatorship of Mussolini). In that regard, this collection certainly has universal value.
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
funny
medium-paced
reflective
slow-paced
mi è piaciuto molto immergermi nelle dinamiche di questa famiglia e del suo linguaggio
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced