| Family Lexicon Contributor(s): Ginzburg, Natalia (Author), McPhee, Jenny (Translator), Boyers, Peg (Afterword by) |
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ISBN: 1590178386 ISBN-13: 9781590178386 Publisher: New York Review of Books OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback Published: April 2017 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Family Life - General - Fiction | Historical - General - Fiction | Political |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2016026803 |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5" W x 7.9" (0.52 lbs) 224 pages |
| Themes: - Topical - Family |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction 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's Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking--when he isn'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'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. Family Lexicon is about a family and language--and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. "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]," Ginzburg tells us at the start. "The places, events, and people are all real." |
Contributor Bio(s): McPhee, Jenny: - Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. She has translated several works from the Italian, including Primo Levi's story collections Natural History and A Flaw of Form, Paolo Maurensig's Canone Inverso, Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II, and contributed to the translation of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone. She is the Director of the Center of Applied Liberal Arts at NYU and lives in New York.Ginzburg, Natalia: - Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was raised in a political and staunchly antifascist Jewish family that is the subject of her novel A Family Lexicon (Lessico Famigliare). During World War II, Ginzburg and her husband edited an antifascist newspaper and after the war she wrote several novels, short stories, essays, and two plays, many of which have been translated into English. |