Description
An Italian family’s everyday life comes into sharp, affectionate focus through a living “lexicon” of phrases, habits, misunderstandings, and recurring stories. As Giuseppe Levi—an exacting scientist with a stubborn love of hiking—sparks and flares over small breaches of language and propriety, his marriage to Lidia and the growing independence of their children unfold against the tightening pressures of Mussolini’s Italy. Blending memoir-like intimacy with the momentum of a novel, this work explores how words can preserve identity, expose hypocrisy, and even serve as tools of survival, deception, and control. With Natalia Ginzburg’s spare, observant style and her gift for turning ordinary speech into moral weather, the book traces an anti-fascist family’s descent from routine into danger—where what is said, misspoken, or repeated becomes inseparable from what is endured.
Available Editions
paperback
New York Review of Books
Published Apr 25, 2017
241 pages
ISBN: 9781590178393
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Details
First Published
1963
Language
eng
Translation
From: ita
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg.