Primo Levi
An Identikit
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- US$39.99
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- US$39.99
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Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi.
Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre.
Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi’s books. In addition to tracing the history of each book’s composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Améry and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives.
This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most unique and urgent voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Belpoliti (Settanta) delivers a thorough overview of the life and works of writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919–1987). "There were always three identities at work in his writing: witness, writer, and chemist," Belpoliti argues, and he explores each as he tracks the origins, influences, and publication of Levi's books. The Levi that emerges is highly methodical, an author whose approach to writing was shaped by his work as a chemist; Levi's background in science, Belpoliti posits, also enabled him to view the horrors of his imprisonment at Auschwitz through the lens of animal behaviorism, as he believed that "men were not beasts, but could easily be transformed into animals depending on the situation." Levi first wrote about this experience in 1947's If This Is a Man, in which he used humor and irony to "relativize—or at least judge from a distance—the things that happened to him" without moralizing. Though the work is organized in an odd way—there's a dizzying number of headers and subheaders—Belpoliti succeeds in capturing Levi's unique talents and offering a penetrating look into his oeuvre. Insightful and comprehensive, this is a fine introduction to a towering literary figure.
