A review by kells30
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

5.0

Ginzburg prefaces this book by saying ‘the places, events, and people in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing’. A curious thing for a novel! Ginzburg uses her own family as the basis for the story, starting from her childhood and recounting the life of her family through to roughly 1950, when she marries her second husband. It’s an incredible novel really considering this - although she hasn’t made anything up, the story truly does become a novel via the choosing of what she recounts, the method of doing so, the way she places people and things next to each other without judgement, the structure. I am so full of admiration! Ginzburg conjures up something fundamental about the family unit through the squabbles, the in-jokes, the patterns of living with these people daily and over the course of years and decades. She manages to barely recount herself whilst being a constant figure, mentioning essential details about herself such as her own marriage almost as an afterthought. For me, the fascination really was in the family interactions rather than the backdrop, which is remarkable given it is set in such a momentous period of history - fascism is a constant threatening presence for most of the novel, but it feels like the centre is always the family essence. She adopts an interesting style, moving on quickly and unexpectedly from fact to fact to jump to something quite unrelated. I really enjoyed it stylistically - it allowed the focus to be on the family unit as a concept, and the shared memory of that unit, rather than getting too deep into individuals and motivations, which was perhaps done to keep it from becoming too personal? Quite funny in places too although the intent is often quite ambiguous.

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