Good morning everyone,

I've been reading the loveliest book this week, it's Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. It's about Italy in the early 20th century so, you know, not entirely untroubled, but it's also about what it means to be a part of a family and what it is to build a family.

Let's start with Natalia Ginzburg herself:

At the age of eighteen Natalia published her first novella, I Bandini, in the distinguished Florentine periodical Solaria, following it with works in Il Lavoro and Letteratura. She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian. Completed in 1937, it was published by Einaudi only in 1946, but its autobiographical nature particularly influenced Ginzburg’s own writings […] she identified with Proust, having herself as a child felt profoundly marginalized. She always found it necessary to bring the reader back to her childhood as a point of departure for her work.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ginzburg-natalia

Here's a review of the book, including her father's opinions on Proust – you don't have to agree with him for this sentence to delight you:

 “At home, we lived in a recurring nightmare filled with my father’s sudden outbursts, exploding as he did often over the most trifling things.” These outbursts are punctuated by insults like “moron,” “buffoon,” “poser,” “dimwit,” and “lummox” (her mother prefers the more flowery “hooligan” and “rapscallion”), which her father lobs at his family, friends, colleagues, and even the ghost of Marcel Proust, who, in his estimation, “must have been a jackass!”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-know-that-story-on-natalia-ginzburgs-family-lexicon/

Her family were friends with Anna Kuliscioff. You'll notice in the below article that Kuliscioff "conducted her life in defiance of the dominant morals of her age", something that Natalia Ginzburg's family only spoke about in whispers and mutters so little wee Natalia was fundamentally confused for a long time about whether or not she (Anna Kuliscioff) was married, had a child, etc.

Kuliscioff opposed “the confused conception that considered the women’s movement as a matter of sex, as an indistinct mass.” Accordingly, she rejected the universalistic discourses of bourgeois feminists and their elitist defense of the interests of upper-class, privileged representatives of womanhood. As she remarked, if “for bourgeois women, men and exploiters are synonymous, for working class women, the exploiter can also be a woman.” Kuliscioff thus deemed “sentimental and utopian” a feminist struggle that ignored social divisions and concealed the conflicting interests of women opposed to one another across class divisions.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-socialist-feminist-anna-kuliscioff-and-the-woman-question/

Do let me know if you have also read and enjoyed this book. I'm quite keen to read some more of hers!

Alex.