Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

As I've mentioned before, I have found lots of good books at the thrift shop by my office, but there have been a handful that are particularly unexpected and which I can't help but think must have been donated by the same person who shares some particular interests with me. Among these is Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg and an Italian edition of La notte dell'oblio, by the Italian Jewish writer Lia Levi. (I also found an Italian edition of Leonardo Sciacia's A ciascuno il suo there, which I was thrilled to find because I have the English language edition and so I can do a side-by-side reading, and a couple other Italian books -- I wonder whose they were?) In any case, I wasn't familiar with Natalia Ginzburg, but it was a New York Review of Books edition and sounded like something I'd enjoy, so I picked it up. Family Lexicon is something of a memoir of Ginzburg's family life from her early childhood in the 19-teens and 20s through about the 1950s. It's organized more anecdotally or by characters than chronologically, but it beautifully recounts Jewish life and anti-fascism in Italy during the 20s, 30s, and 40s. One of the odd things about this book is that, while it is telling true stories about real people (as is amply demonstrated in the notes section of the book, which provides little bios of nearly all the characters in Ginzburg's life and circle, many of whom are well-known figures), it is almost not at all about Ginzburg herself, which is why I called it "something of" a memoir. The reader learns all about her family members and people in her social circle, who are described in lovely, humorous detail. Toward the end we learn a little more about Ginzburg herself, who was exiled to a village in the south of Italy by Mussolini's government, fled the village for Rome with her 3 small children after the German occupation in a German truck with a faked identity and story of lost papers, and lived through so much more, and yet it's all touched on very lightly in the book. Family Lexicon was wonderful, but I'd love to read a memoir of more of Ginzburg's own experiences.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's foray into the spy genre, Transcription, is another book I picked up in London, leaving me with just two London books to go. It covers some of the same ground that was covered in Life After Life and, especially, A God in Ruins, but with new characters and none of the supernaturalities found in those books. The story jumps back and forth between 1940, when the 18-year-old lead character worked for MI5 as a transcriber and occasional spy, and 1950 when her spying days come back to haunt her. As is often the case in spy novels, you're not always sure who is spying on whom (or if everyone is spying on everyone: at times it seems like the whole cast of characters are employed by MI5 to spy one another). Transcription captures very well the madness and self-doubt that must result from these conditions -- especially when the person experiencing the conditions is young and naive. This wasn't my favorite Kate Atkinson book, but that would be a high bar to hurdle. I did thoroughly enjoy it.

The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins

I went down a little Elizabeth Jenkins rabbit hole after seeing a copy of her The Tortoise and the Hare in the background of a photo of her cat Miette that the writer Patricia Lockwood posted on Twitter. I read that book in 2006 and adored it, and the picture made me think I ought to look out other books by Elizabeth Jenkins. As it turns out, very little of her fiction is in print. She was also the author of several biographies and it seems like those are more widely available. In any case, I saw that she had written a memoir, which intrigued me. It was available on Amazon for upwards of $50, but I was able to order it from Abe Books for a little over $20, plus $6 to have it shipped from London, which is still a bit expensive, but not unreasonable. And so I read a second consecutive book shipped to me from London. (The two books - this and 24 Charing Cross Road have quite a bit in common also. They cover some of the same time period and several authors and places and publications pop up in both. The one that struck me most notably was St. Paul's in Covent Square, the Actor's Church, which I now really wish I had visited when I was in London.)

As the foreword, written by her nephew Sir Michael Jenkins, points out, Elizabeth Jenkins lived what was in many ways an unremarkable life, but she lived through a remarkable period (her life spanned nearly the entire 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st), was in contact with many notable figures, and is gifted with the ability to tell the episodes of her life beautifully. From 1939 until about 1995, Jenkins lived at 8 Downshire Hill in Hampstead. I looked the address up and discovered it's just around the corner from the Keats House, which I visited in London and I walked right past Jenkins' former home on my way from the Keats House to the Freud House. In fact, I remember the street well. My father and I were charmed by the Hampstead neighborhood generally. The first house we passed on leaving Hampstead Heath bore a plaque indicating that George Orwell had lived there (this was on Parliament Hill) and from there onward as we walked through the neighborhood, we paid close attention to the homes. When we came out from Keats Grove and made the left onto Downshire Hill, I remember there was a Bentley parked on the corner and I said, "That's not something you see every day." My father said that maybe it was, in London.

In any case, Jenkins' stories of her life in London from the 1920s on through the 1970s gave a wonderful picture of the times she lived through. It was also very interesting to see into her life as a reasonably successful, but not wildly famous, writer.