Family Sayings

Hailed upon publication as a groundbreaking memoir, giving the form “a new dimension, new possibilities, and . . . an aspect that is entirely new” (Times Literary Supplement), Family Sayings is Natalia Ginzburg’s masterpiece and a classic of contemporary Italian literature. Although it asks to be read as fiction, the author, one of Italy’s finest twentieth-century writers, admits that it is highly autobiographical. The book spans the period from the rise of Fascism through World War II (in which her first husband perished at the hands of the Nazis) and its aftermath. Its subject is the other people in Ginzburg’s family. Woven around the inconsequential, revealing remarks that are repeated in a family until they become its affectionate private code, rich in memory and association, this is one of the rare true evocations of a family in modern literature. Family Sayings is at the same time a living history that documents the life of the assimilated Jewish Ginzburg family and the culture to which they belonged. Winner of the Strega Prize—Italy’s Pulitzer for literature—this intimate and candid portrait is no less relevant today than when it was first published in 1963.