#33. A Passage for the End of the Year

Reality, metaphor, yogurt

My father always woke up at four o’clock in the morning. After getting out of bed, his first concern was to go and see if the mezzorado had turned out well. Mezzorado was a kind of sour milk he’d been taught how to make by shepherds in Sardinia. It was actually just yogurt. Yogurt wasn’t yet fashionable then. You couldn’t buy it in dairies and snack bars as you do nowadays. In making his own yogurt my father was, like in so many things, a pioneer. Winter sports weren’t fashionable at the time either, and my father might have been the only one in Turin to engage in them. As soon as snow fell, no matter how light, on Saturday evening he took off for Claviere with his skis on his shoulder. Neither Sestriere nor the hotels in Cervinia existed then. My father regularly slept in a mountain hut above Claviere called the Mautino Hut. He sometimes dragged along with him my siblings or a few of his assistants who shared his passion for the mountains. He used the English pronunciation “ski.” He had learned to ski as a youth while on a trip to Norway. On Sunday night when he came home he would always claim that the snow had been terrible. Snow for him was always too wet or too dry, like the mezzorado, which never turned out just as it should. It always seemed to him either too watery or too thick.

(from Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee)

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Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon is a book that asks to be read as though it were a novel, even if “the places, events, and people are all real,” as Ginzburg writes at the start of the author’s preface. It is a book about storytelling, not so much its powers as its seductions and betrayals, a small, perfect book in which the real-life characters appear to us as the puppets they—characters—are, enlivened by the hand called language that goes up the puppet’s backside and by the compact of reality (stage, curtain) shared by the writer of fact and her reader.

Ginzburg’s father, the biologist and histologist Giuseppe Levi, dominates the household. He is introduced as a chaotic, petulant tyrant and at the same time a lifelong anti-fascist and unshakable idealist. The book concerns the lives of the large Levi family under Mussolini and the adventures of their friends and lovers, as observed by Ginzburg, the family’s youngest and most perceptive child. Their secular Jewishness and their activism lead them into danger, tragedy, and adventure, although the writing always feels conversational and light, essentially comic in tone.

What is this book that has for years been mandatory reading in Italian schools? Is it proto-autofiction? Or what was once called memoir? For a memoir, it lacks the mileposts of conflict and epiphany that now typically characterize the genre. Yet whatever else it is, the author wants us to know up front that it is not fiction, even if it is, to her, a novel. “Each time I found myself slipping into my long-held habits as a novelist and made something up, I was quickly compelled to destroy the invention,” she continues in the preface.

Genre aside, I admire passages like the one above, which like so much of Ginzburg’s writing is deceptively austere and plain—plain yogurt—even if she manages, with the lightest maneuvers, always speech-like in their diction, to lift us out of the simplicity of fable and place us firmly inside history. The exactness of her memory invites us into a political and cultural era we did not know the shape of—the yogurtless era, for instance. (“Yogurt wasn’t yet fashionable then. You couldn’t buy it in dairies and snack bars as you do nowadays.”) Often, both time and place are invoked in the same matter-of-fact miniature of absences and losses. (“Neither Sestriere nor the hotels in Cervinia existed then. My father regularly slept in a mountain hut above Claviere called the Mautino Hut.”)

It is not surprising how much Proust there is in Family Lexicon; he is an author practically every character picks up at one point or another, or else (in the case of Giuseppe) dismisses out of hand:

My mother had read Proust and she, like Terni and Paola, loved his work enormously, and told my father that this Proust was very fond of his mother and his grandmother and had asthma and couldn’t sleep and because noise bothered him, he had covered the walls of his room with corkboard.

My father said, “He must have been a jackass!”

The appearance of Proust’s roman-fleuve was contemporary with Ginzburg’s childhood; she was born three years after the French publication of Du côté de chez Swann. Early in Family Lexicon, a minor character, in love with Ginzburg’s older sister, Paola, is introduced as “a passionate Proustian…and he, in fact, would be the first to write about Proust in Italy.” Ginzburg does not add, except in an aside by her mother much later in the book, that she herself was the first to translate Du côté de chez Swann into Italian, and so would have known how different Marcel, who for a long time went to bed early, was from her father, who always woke up at 4 a.m., and who acts as a foil to the sensitive, passive master hiding in the book’s background scenery. Ginzburg also manages to adopt and transform for her own purposes Proust’s structural techniques—the elegant weaving of memories around recurring motifs—without copying his style, in fact with an almost anti-Proustian style, unfussy and terse, each pizzicato sentence as simple and satisfying as a little génoise cake from Lorraine.

The paragraph at the top of this post is worth rereading. It begins with the Sardinian mezzorado, and through the transformative magic of modal narration, which collects in a single bouquet of action many instances of a narrative event (“always woke up,” “regularly slept,” “sometimes dragged,” “would always claim”) the yogurt is transformed into snow and back again. The line “In making his own yogurt my father was, like in so many things, a pioneer” is the announcement, or first act, of a magic trick, for with it a memory about yogurt is transformed into a class of memories — memories of her father as an early adopter. What follows are other members of this category of memories. The book itself had opened with the father’s love of mountaineering and his brutish abuse of his family, who constantly disappointed him, and now we return to those pages under a new sign, and are ushered into a modal scene of ultimately disappointing mountain snowfall. The ushering begins: “As soon as snow fell, no matter how light, on Saturday evening he took off for Claviere with his skis on his shoulder.” The details then accumulate like snow.

The reveal or conclusion of the magic trick is the equation of snow and yogurt, achieved in the final three sentences. Snow and yogurt, too wet and too dry, too watery and too thick, these unsatisfying substances become heaped up in our minds on either side of the character of the father, Giuseppe, scientist, anti-fascist, and pioneer, buried to his neck in yogurt and snow. What is wonderful about the metaphor is what it doesn’t do, which is to place yogurt and snow directly in comparison as a “clever” observation made by the author about the intrinsic properties of both substances. They are both white, soft, delicate, transient…no. Instead, yogurt and snow are brought together by their relation of disappointment in the mind of her father—Snow for him was always too wet or too dry, like the mezzorado, which never turned out just as it should. It always seemed to him either too watery or too thick—and by the habits that bring him into contact with each substance. The metaphor comes to us through a conjunction of personality and experience in the mind of a character who does not make the comparison himself and would have had no interest in it. He is the conduit for the metaphor rather than its source. You could even say he is the metaphor’s oracle or medium. The metaphor speaks through him but it is not from him; it speaks through us, too. Without touching in any direct sense, both memories—father as yogurtmaker, father as skier—are enriched by the juxtaposition, and by the principles of analogy around which the paragraph is organized. The passage enacts the most revolutionary argument of Proust’s work: that metaphor is the rootstock of thought.

In this way, the paragraph is a microcosm of Family Lexicon and of the Proustian tradition itself, where metaphors act as driving belts between spinning, shaking memories. (A Proustian book is for me essentially a collection of snow-globe memories inside a Rube Goldberg machine of metaphorical cranks, pullies, gears, and belts.) The metaphor is in other words functional, a load-bearing feature rather than adornment. It is essential to the structure of the paragraph just as memories and psychological themes are the organizational principles of the book, whose narrative has nothing to do with Freytag’s pyramid triangle or any other plotting contrivances of the nineteenth-century novel.¹

Late in life, Ginzburg told an interviewer that she admired a fellow novelist who could confidently use the third-person point of view, whereas she felt she lacked the ability to “climb up on mountains and see everything from above.” The younger Ginzburg’s prologue in Family Lexicon makes the same admission in a different spirit. It is almost boasting in its description of the book’s constraints, its lacunae and imperfections, books “based on reality” being often “only faint glimpses and fragments of what we have seen and heard.” For while both authors enter their books through childhood, unlike Proust, she claims to have invented nothing.

No end of year lists for me, although in the past few months, in addition to Family Lexicon, I read and adored Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, and Walter Abish’s How German Is It. I have also been quietly writing and spending less time online, and hope next year brings more of the same. See you in 2023.

xo,
Ben

1. As I read Family Lexicon this winter, I began to have a tingling suspicion about the translator, a novelist with the uncommon name of Jenny McPhee; the translation was so fluid and delightful it seemed to have its own sense of comedy and spirit, although I have no Italian and would be hard-pressed to explain the sensation. Could Jenny McPhee be the daughter of the closest thing magazine reporting has to a Proust, namely the pioneering nonfiction writer John McPhee? Reader, she could.