Ginzburg is not an ostentatious writer. Her prose is famously terse and forceful, an instrument in which the smallest things are made to seem fresh and telling. In Family Lexicon she doesn’t disclose much about her own thoughts or feelings growing up in the Levi home, but when we learn about everyone else in the family circle, in such extraordinary detail and gesture, we readily feel what it was like to be among them. Vulnerabilities and incoherencies are captured more or less as a matter of course, with only occasional commentary. The child, Natalia, as drawn by her adult self, is remarkably nonjudgmental; even when she reports her mother’s preference for the company of her more gregarious sister, she does so without disdain or envy, perhaps taking consolation in obvious signs of her own difference, a difference that would eventually become distinction. In effect, Ginzburg conveys not only impressions but a fully intelligible way of thinking about them without underlining her views or striking edifying postures. For all the humor in Family Lexicon there is also an unmistakable gravity that is not to be confused with explicitly formulated ideas or convictions.