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...