A collection of 36 interviews conducted by various journalists and
authors with Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi between 1961
and 1987..Although best known as a witness to the horrors of Nazi
concentration camps ("If This Is a Man", 1947), Levi had
wide-ranging concerns, and his literary achievements reach from
full-fledged fiction ("If Not Now, When?", 1982) to a reflection on
the nature of labor ("The Wrench", 1987) and various short works of
science fiction. These interviews limn a chemist-by-day,
writer-by-night whose morality, optimism, curiosity, and
thoughtfulness guided him while a prisoner in Auschwitz and later
as a factory worker and internationally acclaimed author. Overall,
the anthology successfully portrays a highly consistent, deeply
introspective writer. This success, however, engenders the work's
greatest weakness: due to Levi's reluctance to discuss his private
life and what appears to be an unfortunate lack of imagination on
the part of his questioners, the collection is dominated by his
repeated and repetitive demonstrations of intellectual and moral
consistency, while the intimacy and personal insights that also
characterize a good interview are decidedly scanted. There are
marked exceptions. Edith Bruck's 1976 portrait, "Jewish, up to a
point," offers a rare glimpse into Levi's personal side, and the
section entitled "Auschwitz and Survival" contains many superlative
pieces, notably "A Self-Interview: Afterword to "If This Is a Man."
"Gems scattered throughout include Levi's reflections on chemistry,
computers, growing old, science fiction, the relationship between
art and society, the nature of racism, his trouble with Kafka, and
his ambivalence toward Israel..The life and ideas of this
fascinating figure certainly warrant in-depth attention, but this
is not the best introduction to the man behind the art.. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Over the course of more than 25 years, Primo Levi gave more than
200 newspaper, journal, radio and television interviews, speaking
with such varied authors as Philip Roth and Germaine Greer. Marco
Belpoliti and Robert Gorden have selected and translated 36 of the
most important of these interviews for this book. We recognize the
voice familiar to us from Levi's masterpieces, from The Periodic
Table to The Drowned and the Saved. But we also see a fuller, more
varied, and more complex picture of the writer famously shrouded in
his past. There is Levi the Holocaust witness; Levi the writer;
Levi the chemist; Levi the intellectual; Levi the political
polemicist and Levi the atheist and Jew, holding onto his Jewish
culture while rejecting the symbols of a faith he could not share.
Levi emerges in a rich, contradictory, and essentially human light
- he was a classic figure out of place. As he put it, I am an
amphibian, a centaur, I live with this paranoiac split. Levi's
status as perhaps the most well known of the survivor-writers of
the Holocaust is enhanced still further by his many voices speaking
in this remarkable book.
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