Natalia Ginzburg’s distorted Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (Lessico famigiliare) was a great disappointment. I thought I knew that period of Italian history quite well, having lived in Turin for a year, and had enthusiastically read Pavese, Gramsci, and other writers who had been based in or associated with Turin. But I found myself turning to the editorial notes for this book, like any reader unaware of 20th-century Italian history. Ginzburg mentions names from history and literature casually, indifferently, but makes no attempt to explain who these people are. The reader loses track of the various friends and family. The narration, such as it is, jumps forward and backward without explanation. Characters are always introduced by their first name and the reader struggles to remember who they are. There is no attempt at a clear chronology. It would be difficult indeed to reconstruct what any family member did at any specific date from this book.

That lack of context is I think a fundamental flaw in the book as a whole. It purports to be a study of her family members and close friends as she remembers them. However, this is not just any family: as a Jew in Italy, Ginzburg lived through some of the worst horrors of the first half of the 20th century. Her husband died in prison while being interrogated. As a Jew, she lived with the possibility of being shipped off to an extermination camp. Several members of her circle were regularly imprisoned or exiled. She was surrounded by people whose lives were robbed or deeply scarred by the Italian Fascist state. Yet Ginzburg explains none of this. There is nothing in the book about the rightness or wrongness of the Fascist state. All she writes about, and this is quite an achievement, is the lurid exaggerations of her father complaining about “negroes”, and her mother’s peculiar whims, such as not trusting the local tailor and mistreating her maids. Yet, quite incredibly, there is not a word of overt complaint about these horrific attitudes. The result is that we are left uncertain about Ms Ginzburg really felt, a little as if she were still a young girl who experiences the prejudices of her parents without being able to put them into any kind of adult context. If Ginzburg is to be believed, both her parents were wildly opinionated, on everything from attitudes to their own family to whether an investment might be sound or not. Ginzburg records it all faithfully and without comment, a bit like a tape recorder. That’s what happened, she seems to say, make your own mind up. Her own husband’s death is given just a passing mention. We don’t know what she thought of his death, or why she married again, or indeed anything at all about Natalia Ginzburg’s own life. She even cryptically refers to “a publisher” when that publisher was Einaudi, a central part of 20th-century Turin history.

It’s a very strange technique, and deeply unsettling. Most people, as Sartre points out, write their autobiography to try to justify what they did and how they currently think. Ginzburg has none of this. She simply reports – and yet what she reports is so coloured, so begging for commentary, that her lack of any judgement becomes suspect. Does she endorse her father’s horrific attitude towards his own family? Does she endorse her mother’s mistreatment of her maids? We do not learn, and the silence becomes quite alarming. Ginzburg’s world is a family lost in self-obsession, without awareness of what is happening, repeating social and racist stereotypes, incapable of seeing the world around them clearly. Ginzburg spends a lot of time recording the family slang terms that had no meaning outside the family unit (such as the term “negro”, which was used by her father to refer to anyone, black or white, that he disapproved of). She patiently explains how these phrases originate, and then presents them as if we will laugh too. We don’t laugh – at least, I don’t. What is she trying to tell us? The book is written in a very colloquial Italian, writes Tim Parks in his introduction. Although I read it in English, I can believe the strange, disconnected universe of the book depicted in non-standard terms, just like the weird personal slang terms her father used.

Perhaps this book is a triumph of insight into human nature; I would rather write it off as an adult incapable of moving beyond the horrific echoing of family life, of being locked in a small space with two, three or more bigots who corrupt other members of the household with their endlessly restated prejudices. We all grew up in families, but we don’t have to celebrate them uncritically like this.