Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

My parents  had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don't write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say 'We haven't come to Bergamo on a military campaign', or 'Sulphuric acid stinks of fart', and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. 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 allow us to recognise each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they're like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time.

Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon details the life of a middle-class family in northern Italy before, during, and after the advent of fascism. There's Natalia herself, of course, though she sort of disappears in the book, becoming the "invisible eyeball" of the text; her father, a chemist prone to outbursts of comic anger; her more diffident mother; her brothers, many of whom become mixed up to some degree in the resistance movement against Mussolini. It's a family that's unusual but not that unusual. You may not have a father who loves skiing to a fault, or who speaks in nothing but exclamation points, but you may recognize the rhythms of a family who are knit together by a series of phrases and quotations that emblemize, for each one, the experiences of growing up together. We may not have a mother who, as Ginzburg emphasizes, tells the same stories over and over again, but who among us does not recognize their parents by the little linguistic quirks that formed the environment in which we came of age? 

Family Lexicon has a strange relationship with the Mussolini years. Clearly they hit the family hard: many of them spent time in jail, and Ginzburg's brother was forced into exile in France; her own husband, Leone Ginzburg, died in one of Mussolini's prisons. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the advent of fascism is an unwelcome distraction from the true subject of the book, something that must be dealt with as an external force that saps the focus on the inner dynamics of the family and their various friends and hangers-on. Ginzburg's death is, at first at least, dashed off with a single line; only after reading several pages about the family's changing habits do we come to understand that the fascist government has ended; Mussolini has been hung from the Esso station somewhere out of the novel's sight. One result is that the book remains light and comic even in the face of the war, yet it never seems morally compromised, nor does the irony of the distance between style and setting become bitter or unpalatable.

It's hard to shake the feeling, too, that Ginzburg herself represents the same kind of problem for the novel. She manages to keep herself invisible for most of the novel, except by necessity: we learn much about the family friend Leone before Ginzburg lets it slip that they become married. In her preface, Ginzburg makes much of her fealty to the truth, saying that the thought of fictionalizing her family's story repels her. And yet, she writes herself out of the story in a way. We know so little of her desires or conflicts, and yet she manages to communicate powerfully the feeling of being swept away on the current of a powerful family environment.