Natalia Ginzburg had a very interesting life, but you’d never know it from reading this memoir. She had an impressive career, a husband who died resisting the Fascists, and knew many interesting people. The book is heavy on the latter. And by interesting, I mean racist. This is only partly a joke. FAMILY LEXICON is a love story to Ginzurg’s immediate family, who have all the embarrassing quirkiness of true blood relatives.
Her father in particularly has a deliriously good time, accusing everyone of being nitwits and identifying ‘nitwitteries’. He likes spending weeks in the mountains, and insists the whole family come too: “You lot get bored,” my father said, “because you don’t have inner lives.” He has – as many older men do, having been so fortunate as to be born into the heyday of patriarchy – strong ideas on food, and on how it should be served to him and what other people should do with it.
If we used our bread to mop up pasta sauce, he yelled, “Don’t lick your plates! Don’t dribble! Don’t slobber!”For my father dibble and slobber also described modern painting, which he couldn’t stand.
He would say, “You have no idea how to behave at the table! I can’t take you lot anywhere.”
I would like to have enjoyed it more, and I did at first; it was kind of like looking through someone else’s family photo album. It’s fun at first, the hairstyles, the puppy fat, but after a while you get bored and just keep going to be polite.