Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Family Lexicon

Family Lexicon

McPhee, Jenny
Ginzburg, Natalia
Boyers, Peg

Paperback

General FictionHistorical Fiction

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN10: 1590178386
ISBN13: 9781590178386
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Apr 25 2017
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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.

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