Family sayings

Fülszöveg

This book is neither autobiography, nor fiction; it is the portrait of the author's family as reflected in her mind over a period of nearly fifty years. Opening this story in an atmosphere of stock sayings such as a keen-witted family uses in the home, and blending them in racy dialogue, Nataha Ginzburg re-creates her family's Hfe, keeping herself very much in the background, with vivid pictures of her father—a professor of anatomy at Turin—her mother and the other children older than herself, all strongly individuahsed characters. Her story begins about 1920, before the advent of Fascism, when she was a child, and goes as far as 1950, the year of her second marriage. Grandparents and cousins are described as vividly as her closer relations, and more family sayings crop up. Most of the family were sociaUsts and, in due course, strong anti-Fascists. For that reason and because they were Jews many of them suffered persecution. But there is no harping on this; the family hfe... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This book is neither autobiography, nor fiction; it is the portrait of the author's family as reflected in her mind over a period of nearly fifty years. Opening this story in an atmosphere of stock sayings such as a keen-witted family uses in the home, and blending them in racy dialogue, Nataha Ginzburg re-creates her family's Hfe, keeping herself very much in the background, with vivid pictures of her father—a professor of anatomy at Turin—her mother and the other children older than herself, all strongly individuahsed characters. Her story begins about 1920, before the advent of Fascism, when she was a child, and goes as far as 1950, the year of her second marriage. Grandparents and cousins are described as vividly as her closer relations, and more family sayings crop up. Most of the family were sociaUsts and, in due course, strong anti-Fascists. For that reason and because they were Jews many of them suffered persecution. But there is no harping on this; the family hfe continues against a dark background. So also when well-known public figures appear such as the sociahst leader Turati or Cesare Pavese, they are vividly drawn but not given undue prominence.
Natalia Ginzburg has been a writer dealing with everyday relationships; now that she has temporarily abandoned purely fictional work for a semi-autobiographical form, she moves with the freedom, wealth of material, and gaiety which embody her achievements in her novels The Road to the City and Voices in the Evening. Her capacity for registering sights and sounds which at other times may have seemed keen to the point of pitilessness is revealed here as boundless affection for persons who existed. Family Sayings is her most remarkable book. Vissza