Primo Levi
A Biography
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'One of the best literary biographies of the year...superb... Levi, I think, would have appreciated it' Observer
Re-issued to mark the centenary of Primo Levi’s birth, now featuring a new introduction from the author.
Discover the definitive biography of the iconic writer and Holocaust survivor.
On 11 April 1987 the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi fell to his death in the house where he was born. More than forty years after his rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, it seemed that Levi had taken his own life. His account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, is recognised as one of the essential books of mankind.
Ian Thomson spent over ten years in Italy and elsewhere researching and writing this matchless biography. This incomparable book unravels the strands of a life caught between the factory and the typewriter, family and friends. Deeply researched, it sheds new light on Levi's recurring depressions and unearths vital information about his premature death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomson's biography of Primo Levi comes a little over a year after Carole Angier's Levi biography, The Double Bond. The merits of the two are sharply distinct from each other. Where Angier considered broader questions of culture and identity, Thomson is brisk and novelistic. Thomson had extensive, exclusive access to Levi papers and family members, where Angier had almost none. For that reason alone, any Leviphile will derive considerable pleasure from Thomson's account. The fast-paced narrative sometimes results in frustratingly concise characterizations ("Chemistry was to be a powerful magnet for the inadequate teenager looking for a focus to his life"), but that may well be the price for a book that follows Levi's comings and goings so closely. Thomson, who has translated the novels of Sicilian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia into English and wrote Bonjour Blanc, is particularly attentive to the often glossed-over later years of the author's life, tracing the twin courses of his publishing career and his deepening struggle with depression. Since Levi's tragic suicide in 1987, the search for the true man behind the mythic Holocaust survivor has only intensified; Levi biographers always find they must compete not only with each other but with their subject, whose immortal memoirs will inevitably have the final say. In the end, Thomson's contribution may concentrate more on the trees than the forest, but its smoothly assembled accumulation of details renders an invaluable service to the Levi legacy.
