The absence of trauma in Family Lexicon and how that shapes the work

Not much more to say than a brief follow-up on Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (1963), in particular noting the weird emphasis and ellipses in this novel/memoir. As I finished  reading this book it was astonishing how little NG wrote about the major traumatic events of her life, especially the imprisonment, torture, and murder of her first husband. One one paragraph he gets a brief mention - he left home that day and I never saw him again, she writes (I'm paraphrasing but it's close). In another paragraph toward the end she makes the only reference to the fact that he was imprisoned and killed by the fascists in Italy during WWII. But this is not to say that the novel/memoir isn't all the more powerful for its deliberate omissions; by focusing on the goofiness of family life, the petty rivalries of the various anti-fascists parties and factions, the eccentricities of the owners and employees of the publishing house in Turin where she worked, and most of all the bullying but oddly lovable, as in a sit-com, behavior of her father she paints a picture w/ many ominous blank spaces: how people just became accustomed to the many arrests, imprisonments, and inexplicable releases of so many friends and family members (oddly, we see the same thing in a TV series I'm currently watching, A French Village), the disappearances and deaths, the need to relocate multiple times, the suicides, all these are mentioned in passing and then passed over, which in its strange way makes this book all the more horrifying. Plenty have testified to the horrors of deportation and imprisonment, particularly in the occupied countries, but in her portrayal of ongoing family life, with songs, puns, paternal tirades, skiing excursions all under the shadow of death, NG has created here a unique memoir. Think of how different this work would feel had it been set in another time and place: A schmaltzy lighthearted look at life in a neurotic, artistic family as perceived by the youngest of 5 children. But thanks to the "empty spaces," that's not how this book feels at all. Nobody will make a sit-com of this work.