[...] Nella sua sopravvivenza e nella sua scrittura c’è stato un doppio fallimento del sistema lager. Il sistema lager non ha agito su Levi con tutta la sua forza. Perché Levi era un chimico, perché ha imparato il tedesco, perché non si è mai ammalato, e perché ha avuto la fortuna di ammalarsi negli ultimi giorni, evitando la marcia della morte, l’evacuazione dal lager (raccontata da Elie Wiesel)[...]
[...]«C’è Auschwitz, quindi non può esserci Dio». [...] «Non trovo una soluzione al (...)

The Mystery of Primo Levi

Tim Parks

• The Complete Works of Primo Levi
    edited by Ann Goldstein, with an introduction by Toni Morrison
    Liveright, three volumes, 2,910 pp., $100.00

Primo Levi was born in 1919 on the fourth floor of an “undistinguished” apartment block in Turin and aside from “involuntary interruptions” continued to live there in the company of his mother until in 1987 he threw himself down the stairwell to his death. The longest interruption was from September 1943 to October 1945 and would provide Levi with the core material for his writing career: it involved three months on the fringe of the partisan resistance to the German occupation, two months in a Fascist internment camp, eleven months in Auschwitz, and a further nine in various Russian refugee camps.

In 1946, aged twenty-seven, despite working full-time as a chemist, Levi completed his account of his time in a concentration camp. Now widely considered a masterpiece, If This Is a Man was turned down by Turin’s main publishing house, Einaudi, in the person of Natalia Ginzburg, herself a Jew whose husband had died in a Fascist prison. It was also rejected by five other publishers. Why? [...] (The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2015)