There is little point in saying what happens to Natalia Ginzburg's characters, so haphazard does it appear. Everything happens, and nothing—or nearly nothing. So it has been in all her writing over the past thirty years, memoirs as well as fiction. The style never varies, nor do the characters; nor does the treatment she gives them (though the social world they move in has changed drastically). Birth and death, love, relationships, separations, the large matters of personal life, are given the same amount of space on the page, the same weight in the telling, as the supposed trifles….

Is she a comic writer? Well, Lessico famigliare is one of the most memorably funny books about family life in Italy or anywhere else. Yet sad, too, her characters … doomed to an everlasting melancholy that has little to do with circumstances or even, in a sense, with unhappiness; a sort of low-spiritedness, a sense of fatality, a weather of greyness lit by very occasional moments of tender remembrance and longing, as relationships, mostly unsatisfactory, are lit by impulses of warmth, affection and loyalty directed towards the unlikeliest people. Flicked rather than buffeted not so much by fate as by their own limitations, these people centrally set in a shifting society—always bourgeois, always familiar to their creator, who never strays from the world she knows so well—take on an emblematic character; if only as symbols of the inconsistency of their world and its eternal, eternally altering relationships.

Famiglia consists of two novelle, one called "Famiglia", the other "Borghesia" (the two main Ginzburg themes). Both end with the main character's death through illness in hospital, both reflect the changing attitudes in Italy to things like marital breakups and illegitimacy, and both have a roundabout action in which people behave with a sort of consistent unpredictability, an illogicality with no central thread except something like selfhood; not selfishness but a stolid integrity (of sorts) which is hard to classify but brilliantly portrayed. They don't communicate much with one another except in flashes of sympathy, moments of calm and sudden awareness of affection, need, even sweetness. They live from moment to moment, perched precariously on mood.

They are not described very closely, yet the flat phrases used about them take on an extraordinary vividness: an anorak, a hairstyle, a way of walking, why are they memorable, and seemingly familiar? Signora Ginzburg goes beyond social realism, realistic though, in a baffling sort of way, her characters are. They are what Forster envisaged as umbrella-owners, and behind them is the bourgeois certainty of never quite being lost or totally poor….