Family Lexicon

"This is a book you can read again and again and again, and find something new in it every single time, the way that—if you start really listening—you can hear something new in your family stories. You might hear a new detail, or you might find a new question to ask. Ginzburg wrote Family Lexicon while she was living abroad, living in England. So it’s a product of longing, a product of homesickness, of her trying to rediscover that sense of belonging. She has this wonderful term: she talks about ‘the dictionary of our past’. She’s talking about how her family had all these phrases, these linguistic tics. And they bind you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter All families have them. Ginzburg says that one word, one sentence, from her childhood, having been repeated time and time again, can become a kind of distinguishing family feature passed down the generations. She says that if she and her siblings were in a cave, stripped of light, and they heard one of those phrases, they would know exactly who they were in the presence of. They are all, she says, inextricably linked, these words and phrases, to the fabric of that family. The book is in no way grand, even though it’s dealing with these huge figures (lots of famous faces are involved), a huge time—war comes and goes in a few pages. This is about everyday life, about what happens in houses rather than in government offices. She sees people for what they are. Tim Parks pointed out that, in Family Lexicon , “the way a character dresses gets more attention than his views on fascism.” Which is a much truer way of living through those mad times. Daily life went on. The daily observation of detail. And, weirdly, this precision of detail gives the work this timeless quality. You don’t need to know it was the twentieth century, because of the way that it’s written—it could have been written yesterday, it just feels so fresh. Totally. I think it’s very interesting that she’s having this revival. It was the hundredth anniversary of her birth a few years ago, and there were lots of reissues going on, fresh translations. But when Natalia Ginzburg first started writing there was a lot of snobbery about the way that she wrote—certainly in Italy —because she wrote about things so plainly. There were none of the more flowery textures in her writing that Italians at the time tended to think marked out great literature. She was stripping it bare. It’s taken time for Italian readers to appreciate that, but now I don’t think there would be any question that she’s one of the great twentieth-century writers. She’s really having a heyday now. One of the things people remark on in this memoir is that she’s absent from the book; they say it’s a memoir without its central figure. But I think that’s a misconception; she’s there on every single page, and that’s something I found really inspiring. This book is a model of how you can be present as an author without constantly forcing your ‘I’ under people’s noses. She’s there in the rhythms of the language, she’s there in the mood, in the observations. But she’s not shoving herself central stage. She’s a presence rather than an appearance, if that makes any sense. She suffuses the whole thing."

"Family Lexicon , which is more like a novelized memoir, is a valuable testimony of how private life unfolded during Fascist Italy. The family in question was anti-Fascist and half-Jewish and the bonds and private language of the family are effectively set against the encroachments and tyranny of the Fascist state. The perspective of the female narrator is also important given the predominance of testimonies from anti-Fascist men. One lesson of the book is the importance of family ties in creating spaces of autonomy from the dictatorship. Another is that the normalization of authoritarianism is a creeping process, parents who knew something about life under democracy often felt differently about Mussolini than children who grew up only with him as leader and saw his face everywhere. We are at the opposite end of the authoritarian arc, we are at the start, in a period of declining democracy. In this case the task is not to hide away and become apolitical, nor to accept all the small changes in policy, and tone of public life without doing something to protest against it, using the freedoms we have now. I don’t. I think it’s very important to distinguish leaders of the past, who wanted to have one party dictatorships. Few exemplars of those types of dictatorships remain, the most prominent ones are China and North Korea . Today you don’t need a one-party state to do what you want to do as an autocrat. Putin and Orban retain the semblance of democracy and have elections but they are not free or fair ones and the opposition press barely exists. Nor would Trump and Bolsonaro need a one-party state. Orban tries to legitimize this system calling it “illiberal democracy” but I prefer “new authoritarian.” Strongmen is a history of the authoritarian form of rule and how it has evolved over a hundred years. Post-Communists like Putin and Orban are in the book but no Communist rulers, since my aim is to study how these men ruined democracies. Most of the chapters are organized thematically. So the reader can learn, in turn, how the use of propaganda, violence, corruption, masculinity, etc. have evolved from the time of Mussolini up to the time of Trump and Erdogan today. This way we can isolate what is off-the-table, such as mass killing on the scale of Mao or Stalin and what is still used effectively today. So to come back to the question: Is Trump fascist? He is not a fascist, but he uses tools, such as rallies and propaganda and personality cults, very effectively and these tools come from the fascist past."