Primo Levi

An Identikit

Marco Belpoliti, Clarissa Botsford

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781803091907, 9780857428998
• eBook ISBN: 9780857429360
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

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.

Table of contents

• Belpoliti’s Copyright page
• NOTE on the English Edition
• Preface
• Portrait with His Mother
• If This Is a Man
• LEMMAS
• Portrait of a Student (c.1937)
• Is If This Is a Man Really ‘a Detached Studyof Certain Aspects of the Human Mind’as the Author Claims?
• Why If This Is a Man Was Rejected by Einaudi and Other Publishers, or Why So Much Time Went By before It Was Understood and Appreciated
• Is If This Is a Man a Comedy or a Tragedy?
• Photo of the False Identity Card (c.1942)
• The Truce
• LEMMAS
• Dreams, Nightmares and Visions from If This Is a Man, The Truce and the Short Stories
• Can Primo Levi be Considered a Political Writer?
• Natural Histories
• LEMMAS
• Flaw of Form
• LEMMAS
• Portrait of a Chemist (1952)
• The Periodic Table
• ‘Vanadium’ and the Grey Doctor Müller
• LEMMAS
• Portrait of the Family (1963)
• The Wrench
• LEMMAS
• What Literary Genre Does Primo Levi Belong To?
• The Search for Roots
• LEMMAS
• Portrait of Levi Smoking and Debating (1978)
• Lilith and Other Stories
• Portrait with an Owl Mask (1986)
• LEMMAS: Levi’s Alphabet of Animals
• Levi, the Ecologist
• Portrait with a Personal Computer (1986)
• If Not Now, When?
• LEMMAS
• At an Uncertain Hour (Collected Poems)
• Other People’s Trades
• LEMMAS
• Uncollected Stories and Essays
• LEMMAS
• Portrait of a Retired Chemist (c.1986)
• The Drowned and the Saved
• LEMMAS
• Levi, Bellow and the King of the Jews
• LEMMAS
• Levi’s Hall and Stairwell (c.1987)
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Credits for Photographs