“Dribbledrams! Doodledums! Nitwitteries!” These are a few of the signature eccentric sayings that Italian novelist and essayist Ginzburg ascribes to members of her family in this unusual portrait of everyday life in Italy from the 1920s to 50s. An experimental novel-cum-memoir first published in 1963, it features her parents, older siblings, in-laws, dissident friends and acquaintances, as well as those known through her mother’s oft-recounted reminiscences, who had “assumed the step of the dead, light and elusive”.

The expressions recur through the book, becoming leitmotifs, character distillations that resonate as much through accumulation as explanation. She describes this idiosyncratic lexicon as “our Latin, the dictionary of our past” and “the basis of our family unity”. It forms the building blocks for a lovingly rendered, abruptly funny domestic scene, punctured only rarely by the surrounding political turbulence; her husband’s death during the German occupation, for instance, is given just a sentence.

“Novelists and poets had been starved of words during the fascist years,” notes the author; in the face of this paucity, Family Lexicon celebrates the essential vitality of language.

• Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee, is published by Daunt. To order a copy for £8.59 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.