Of course Family Lexicon cannot possibly recover from this blunt, devastatingly terse report. Not even the Levi family can summon the voluble bluster and blab to lift their lives back onto the plateau of anxious comedy where they had once resided. Postwar Italy is in ruins. Everyone is older. There is not much to laugh about, and yet the book ends on something of a comic, but hardly resolved, note. The war has been survived, for the most part, but survival is a work in progress. Si tira avanti. The family moves forward, inching its way toward recovery. The losses have been enormous, but their instincts are to retrieve what they can, and as always recovery will be bound up with the recovery of laughter, or at least with recovering the reliable triggers for laughter: the sayings, spells, and familiar locutions forged by a shared experience which, though now marked by deep sadness, are the true mark of their identity and their common will to live.