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.

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg

I don’t know how to explain why I feel more alone now. Maybe it was because we shared memories. Memories only he and I knew, even though we never spoke of them when we met. I realize now it didn’t matter that we didn’t talk about them. They were a presence in the hours we spent together at Cafe Canova, those oppressive, never ending hours. They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.

Like Waiting for Godot, Happiness as Such revolves around an absence, really a pair of absences--the physical absence of exiled son Michele and the metaphysical absence of the elusive happiness of the title. The main characters, like Michele’s mother Adriana in the excerpt above, try to articulate something about both absences, what they mean, what they look like, what it would mean if they were present. But the “as such” in the title is a guiding principle here--no one gets much closer than a facsimile of either, though sometimes it’s enough for them.

Michele, pursued by the authorities for his involvement in revolutionary activities, has left Italy, and in his wake his family--especially mother Adriana and sister Angelica--and his friends--maybe-baby-mama Mara and bestie-and-possibly-gay-lover Osvaldo--are working to clean up the mess he’s left behind. Much of the book is either epistolary, comprised of letters between those left in Italy and Michele, or dialogue. There’s no direct speech from Michele, but most of the other characters spend time conversing, often about where, exactly, Mara and her baby are going to stay, whether or not Osvaldo is gay and if he was Michele’s lover, and what, exactly, is going to be done with the property belonging to Adriana’s recently deceased husband, especially the unfinished tower that represents the ways the various relationships in the book have been left permanently unresolved by the father’s death and Michele’s absence.

Michele himself doesn’t come off so well, his political involvements facile and his actions directed only at what will bring him the most short-term happiness--that word again. He won’t come to his father’s funeral, won’t send more than cursory responses to his mother’s letters, won’t help Mara with the baby, won’t tell the family what to do with the tower which was actually bequeathed to him. Instead his letters are filled with excuses, evasions, grand statements of future plans that come to nothing, requests for pretentious books. He’s an infuriating character, made worse by the love that the closeted Osvaldo has for him, love that’s exploited so Michele’s every whim can be met.

In the end (SPOILER), Michele is killed during a protest in Bruges, cutting short all the stories being told here. The tower is sold, unfinished, to developers, and the people who’ve revolved around Michele find themselves unmoored, uncertain what to do next. But they talk, and talk, and talk. “You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left.” Angelica says, and it’s easy to imagine these people moving on, recentering their lives on something besides the void that was Michelle.