the language of love: reading Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon
language makes a family in this midcentury novel
There’s an endearing trend on TikTok at the moment where friends and families take turns guessing phrases from shared dictionaries of private jokes. One person holds up a phone screen with a word or phrase on it, and the other person tries to describe it without saying the actual word, Taboo style. “You say this when we see a person wearing ugly shoes.” “We say this when dad spends five minutes trying to perfect his parallel park.”
I couldn’t get these videos out of my mind last month while I was reading Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Published in 1969, Family Lexicon is technically a work of fiction, but this classification feels terribly misleading. Ginzburg states at the beginning:
“The places, events, and people in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing, and each time I found myself slipping into my long-held habits as a novelist and made something up, I was quickly compelled to destroy the invention.”
Ginzburg writes that the reason the book is a novel and not a work of nonfiction is because “memory is ephemeral, and because books based on reality are often only faint glimpses and fragments of what we have seen and heard.” Well said, Ginzburg. But the characters in this novel feel nothing like faint glimpses of memory. They feel like shockingly, hilariously real people, people who I’d love to sit with in a cafe and chat with for hours.
Family Lexicon is about the Levi family of Turin, Italy: Natalia’s parents, Giuseppe and Lidia Levi, their five children, and the wide cast of extended family, friends, and comrades who surround them. This was my first foray into the work of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, who has written many novels, short stories, and essays. Much of Ginzburg’s life and work was impacted by the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century. Her writing tends to centers the family and the domestic sphere, but while doing so, it encompasses many of the most important social and political issues of her time.
The novel in discussion begins with a portrait of the family patriarch, Giuseppe—a thundering presence of a man who likes everything a particular way (well, his way). He believes strongly in mountain hikes, socialism, and little else. Anyone who disagrees with him is a “nitwit,” “jackass,” or a “Negro,” a word that meant “foolish, awkward, or stupid” in the Judeo-Italian language of Venetian Jews like Giueseppe Levi. His wife Lidia is a gentler and less abrasive creature, but not without her own set of sly remarks. She dubs any man with a red nose a “Barbison,” after a coarse uncle with a big, red nose. Another uncle is called the “Lunatic,” not because he is one, but because he is a doctor who treats the insane.
These inside jokes, favorite phrases, and loving insults are the threads throughout the book, and throughout the lives of all the Levi children. Ginzburg writes poignantly:
“If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.”
Although Family Lexicon takes place in the 1930s and 1940s, some of the Levi’s family phrases sound so modern that I would expect to find them in one of the aforementioned TikTok videos before I did in a mid-twentieth century novel. When one of the Levi children meets a new friend that they can’t stop talking about, Giuseppe and Lidia remark, “New star rising!” which I find utterly hilarious and might have to adopt into my own daily vocabulary.
In a book so obsessed with the particularities of language, I can only imagine the great, painstaking care that Jenny McPhee took in translating this novel. In a fascinating interview published online by Reading in Translation, McPhee discusses the challenge of translating dialect in the novel. Much of Family Lexicon is written in Torinese or Venetian dialect, adding another layer of complexity to creating an English translation. McPhee made choices to leave certain words untouched, in their original form, to preserve language difference—in other words, to not always force a direct translation, but to allow the text to reflect the difference in language and culture that a reader should experience while reading a translated work.
It’s not only this specificity of language that cements the bonds of the Levi family. Storytelling is an important part of their family dynamic. Lidia Levi always tells the same stories over and over again, much to the chagrin of Giuseppe.
“‘I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve heard this story,’ my father would shout, overhearing a word or two as he passed by.
My mother, her voice lowered, would continue on with the story.”
Family Lexicon seems a wildly personal and intimate novel when you realize that it serves to collect all of the Levi family stories in one place, committing them to record forever. It makes you marvel that every family has a history of stories and shared language just like Levis, that there are millions of novels that could be written out of the lore of families everywhere.
In such a personal text, Ginzburg herself is nearly invisible. While she takes considerable care to illustrate the daily fabric of their lives, Ginzburg feels more like a fly on the wall than a member of the Levi family. It seems highly unusual, given the autobiographical slant of the book, for the author to be so absent. But I believe this perspective may be another part of why Ginzburg felt the book best suited to the form of a novel than a memoir. This is not an account of a life lived by Ginzburg, but a story that encompasses many people and places, a story that skims along the surface of Ginzburg’s own life while diving deep into the life of a distant uncle or long-forgotten neighbor. It’s not an individual’s story, but the story of a collective.
The voice of Family Lexicon is steady, witty, and wry, even when Ginzburg and the Levi family are experiencing the worst trials of their lives. Ginzburg mentions her husband Leone Ginzburg’s death in such a brief, fleeting sentence that I had to reread the page several times to see if it had really happened. Leone was arrested by the Facist regime and died by torture. The entire Levi family was deeply affected by the rise of facism in Europe, with many arrests and close calls. This dark period of history is a menacing shadow cast across the novel, and yet, the Levi family never ceases to cheer each other and hang tight to all they know to be true—their strong political and moral beliefs, their treasured family bonds, and the language known only to them: their family lexicon.
Ginzburg’s writing is so sharp and precise that writing about this novel almost feels wrong. I think the only way to truly grasp just how wonderful, funny, and heartbreaking Family Lexicon is would be to pick up the book for yourself. It’s certainly my “new star rising” of the season.
Quilt Details: Campagna Toscana by Annamaria Brenti, Rome, Italy