Family Lexicon

<b><b>A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction</b></b><br><br>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&#146;s <i>Family Lexicon</i>. Giuseppe Levi the father is a scientist consumed by his work and a mania for hiking&#151;when he isn&#146;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&#146;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.<br><br> <i>Family Lexicon</i> is about a family and language&#151;and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also&#160;as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel yet everything is true. &#147;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]&#148; Ginzburg tells us at the start. &#147;The places events and people are all real.&#148;