Family Lexicon

A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking — when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini's Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family and language — and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. "Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it]," Ginzburg tells us at the start. "The places, events, and people are all real."

"It's life-changingly good. It's a lesson in how to live." — Monica Ali, Elle

"The raw beauty of Ginzburg's prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity." — Hilma Wolitzer

"A glowing light of modern Italian literature...Ginzburg's magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase." — Kate Simon, The New York Times

Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) was an Italian author, raised in a political and staunchly antifascist Jewish family that served as the subject for her novel A Family Lexicon (Lessico Famigliare). During World War II, Ginzburg and her husband edited an antifascist newspaper and after the war she wrote several novels, short stories, essays, and two plays, most of which have been translated into English. Throughout her life, Ginzburg was known for her activism and her controversial conversion to Catholicism, and for a time belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament in 1983 and died in Rome.

Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and, most recently, A Man of No Moon. She has translated several works from the Italian, including Primo Levi’s story collections Natural History and A Flaw of Form, Paolo Maurensig's Canone Inverso, Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II, and contributed to the translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. McPhee co-founded The Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon in London, and is the feminism columnist for the on-line magazine Bookslut. McPhee lives in London. 

Peg Boyers is the author of three books of poems, including To Forget Venice (2014) and Honey with Tobacco (2007). Her 2002 volume, Hard Bread, is built around the life of Natalia Ginzburg. Boyers is the executive editor of Salmagundi and teaches poetry at Skidmore College.