Narrative Modes in Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Novels

This chapter looks at two very important texts for the history and evolution of the Italian novel, Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (Menzogna e sortilegio,1948) and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (Lessico famigliare), winner of the 1963 Strega Prize. Reinterpreted as creative projects that employ diverse expressive modalities to narrate the family, the two texts’ stylistic and thematic particularities expose a profound split in the conception of the family story itself. On the one hand, reality is transfigured into Morante’s novel, while on the other, Ginzburg’s novel, which claims to have invented nothing, is to be read as a novelistic invention. In Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, the writer Elisa, affected by various hereditary diseases, must surround herself with lies, but her narcissism positions her as the ideal interpreter, according to Claude Imberty, of a mise-en-abyme of the “family novel” itself. From the opposite perspective, Family Lexicon represents one of the most famous models of writing that reflects on how to tell the story of a family without frills, without lies, without defenses, but above all, without accusations. Revealing linguistic traits and lexical habits means talking about the ritual with which objects and persons come to be identified only by members of that family and only that family, without the fear of being recognized by those not part of that family unit.