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insertsthwitty 's review for:
Family Lexicon
by Natalia Ginzburg
Ahhh, this was so good! It is amazing how effortless some people's writing is, and Natalia Ginzburg's is a prominent example. The ability to capture a person's essence, or a feel, or what of their personality or quirks has stayed alive with another person, is a hard one to eke out and hard to come by.
Throughout it all she smuggles some pretty poignant messages - she was of Jewish heritage and lived during World War II, after all. But she does not go for overt dramatics, which I'm always thankful for.
Possibly the only drawback for me is the fact that most of the family men here are just obnoxious towards their wives (hardly to do with the book, it just really bothered me to continue reading this stuff at some point) and the inclusion of the word negroism in a derogative sense. This one I'm also struggling with, because in Venetian Italian apparently this has no racial connotations and so can be accepted as a family saying. On the other hand, why then wasn't it translated accordingly? Why did Natalia Ginzburg not change it?
Throughout it all she smuggles some pretty poignant messages - she was of Jewish heritage and lived during World War II, after all. But she does not go for overt dramatics, which I'm always thankful for.
Possibly the only drawback for me is the fact that most of the family men here are just obnoxious towards their wives (hardly to do with the book, it just really bothered me to continue reading this stuff at some point) and the inclusion of the word negroism in a derogative sense. This one I'm also struggling with, because in Venetian Italian apparently this has no racial connotations and so can be accepted as a family saying. On the other hand, why then wasn't it translated accordingly? Why did Natalia Ginzburg not change it?