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Primo Levi: A Life

ian thomson

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Primo Levi wrote books that have been called "the essential works of humankind," including Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table. Yet he lived an unremarkable existence, remaining to his death in the house in which he'd been born; managing a paint and varnish factory for thirty years; and tending his invalid mother to the end. Now, in a matchless account, Ian Thomson unravels the strands of an influential life.

640 pages, Paperback

First published December 30,1999
Literary awards
jewish quarterly-wingate prize, w.h. heinemann award, 

This edition

Format
640 pages, Paperback
Published
December 1, 2004 by Picador
ISBN
9780312423674
ASIN
0312423675
Language
English

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ian thomson

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Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 17 votes)
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17 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
catalysst
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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4 stars for the incredible amount of research done by Thomson. That said, the avalanche of facts and details - including absolute minutia as well as extraneous facts about other people - rather buries Levi under all the notecards. Events can be summarized. Not everything is important! The writings are intelligently introduced and the suicide treated sensitively. But I can’t say that I actually got a sense of Levi from all the empirical data. Thomson says that the image of the centaur, which appears in a short story by Levi, was also used only by Jacques Tati. But Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist, and resident of Turin, famously uses the centaur as a metaphor for the division of the body politic, the state and civil society - or in Romantic terms, the head and the heart. This metaphor might have been usefully applied to Levi himself.
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Shyouu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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An extraordinary life, and an extraordinary accomplishment to do it justice in this bio. Recommended for anyone who loves writing or seeks to understand the human condition.
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BlankAsvk
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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An incredible amount of research has gone into this book; maybe a little too much to be honest, by the last 100 pages I was getting a little antsy for it to be finished. I appreciate the enormous amount of work the author put into this book but I think some of the minutiae could have been trimmed and nothing would be lost.

One thing I did really appreciate though was the sensitive and non-judgemental way that Thomson discusses Primo Levi's suicide.
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Sky_oppai
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Primo Levi, judeu italiano, licenciado em Química, lutou contra a ocupação nazi até que um dia foi preso no campo de concentração em Auschwitz. Baseado na sua experiência de “estadia” neste campo, o autor escreve-nos este precioso testemunho que poucos sobreviveram para contar.
A certa altura, nesta obra, lemos “Ninguém deve sair daqui, pois poderia levar para o mundo, juntamente com a marca gravada na carne, a terrível notícia do que, em Auschwitz, o homem teve coragem de fazer ao homem.” No entanto, Primo Levi, saiu e publicou o seu testemunho. Não é um testemunho que pretende impressionar, nem acusar ninguém (como ele próprio refere) mas mostrar o que realmente aconteceu. Deixar um registo que, posteriormente possa servir de estudo à “alma” humana.
Os factos pelos quais passou, são contados de forma distanciada e ao mesmo tempo muito sentida, conta-nos até onde foi capaz de sobreviver, até quando os seus colegas aguentaram…O sofrimento foi imenso ao ponto de nos dizer que as palavras - fome e frio, teriam certamente outro significado para os milhares de prisioneiros cujas vidas foram abusadas e violadas nos seus direitos. E não o significado que nós, pessoas livres conhecemos…
Será que se podia chamar a todos aqueles prisioneiros homens?? Esta é a grande questão do livro, como o próprio título refere: “Se Isto é um Homem”
Este é um livro de leitura obrigatória e engana-se aquele que achar que este é simplesmente mais um livro sobre Auschwitz. É um relato único, que não pretende comover, mas relatar a realidade pela qual homens estiveram sujeitos, privados das condições básicas para sobreviver.
Aconselho!
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Morgana_Verena
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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“On 11 April 1987, a day of bright spring sunshine, Primo Levi fell to his death in the block of flats where he lived in Turin in northern Italy. He died in the same building where, in 1919, he had been born. The authorities pronounced a verdict of suicide. Levi, at only sixty-seven, had pitched himself three flights down the stairwell: life had become intolerably dark and cheerless for him.” is the opening paragraph of the Introduction to this biography.

Primo Levi* (1919-1987) was born in Turin, Italy. He was a scientist (physics and chemistry), a partisan, an enthusiastic mountaineer and an author of fiction and nonfiction. To quote author Ian Thomson: ”In Italy, Levi is a national monument.”.
But Levi was Jewish and a partisan, and was first sent to an internment camp in Italy and from there to the German concentration camp Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz he had become 174517, indicating that he was no longer a person, but simply an object, either to be destroyed or to be used as slave labour. Levi was grilled about his education, his knowledge, his thesis and his experience. ”Levi’s knowledge of physics, or rather physical chemistry, seemed to have impressed Pannwitz: physics, quite as much as chemistry, helped to save Levi’s life at Auschwitz.” He was employed in a laboratory until the end of the war when the survivors of these camps were finally liberated. Primo Levi wrote his famous testament of what he saw and experienced** at Auschwitz: ’Se questo è un uomo’/‘If This Is a Man’.

Ian Thomson interviewed Primo Levi nine months before Levi died, and he also interviewed as many friends, acquaintances and colleagues as possible. Levi was much more than prisoner 174517, and so the reader learns about his family and friends, his love of nature and mountaineering (he was fit and slim), his partisan work, subsequent capture and internment as mentioned above, as well as his work after leaving Auschwitz. Levi’s writing is discussed; he wrote novels, poems, essays and memoirs. He was friends with and knew several authors including Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, Philip Roth and others.

Included in this fine biography are photographs, notes, an introduction and a preface, a bibliography and an index.
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*Primo Levi is not to be confused with Carlo Levi, the author of ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’, who was related to Primo Levi through marriage.

**”On his emergence from the P-M-Abteilung, Oscar contemptuously wiped some engine grease off his hand on to Levi’s shoulder, using him as a convenient rag. Forty years later Levi said this was the ‘greatest insult’ of his life; it was typical of the writer in Levi to see the large offence in the apparently small act.”
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WonwoosPinky
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This is a fascinating, in-depth account of the life and work of Primo Levi. I have read a couple of Levi's books and I started this one because my Reading Group was reading The Periodic Table and I wanted to know more about Levi himself.

This book begins with Levi's suicide and ends explaining that it is impossible to really know why Levi chose to die that way. As the book explains Levi did suffer from terrible depression and perhaps that was 'all' it was. Did his experiences during The Holocaust make this worse it seems impossible to know, but I suspect not? He seems to have channeled his experiences in Auschwitz in a different way: into witnessing. The book makes it clear that the semi-regular reemergence of Holocaust denial and neo-Fascism pained Levi. The book quotes Levi himself, "Daniel Toff asked Levi if he thought that the tendency was for people to forget Auschwitz. 'Signs do exist that this taking place: forgetting or even denying it. This is significant: those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.'" (p431)

Levi's personal life seemed to be a burden to him. People saw him trapped in his home by his elderly, infirm mother. He also seemed burdened by old age and the fears that this brings. But I am turning this review into a focus on his death, which is wrong.

Ian Thomson does a great service here by focusing on Levi's life and its living. He knits the biggers historical picture together with the specifics of Levi's life neatly and this is especially effective as the claws of Fascism, then Nazism dig into the Jewish community in Italy. I feel Thomson also does an excellent job of explaining Levi's post-War feelings about Germany and Germans and about forgiveness or lack of forgiveness.

Overall this is a good biography of a good man and a great writer. It is a reminder - to me anyway - of the importance of never forgetting or diminishing the Holocaust. But as Levi himself wanted not just to be defined by that event. He wanted to write not just about the Holocaust - and I wasn't aware that he wrote - and liked - science-fiction, for example. And again Thomson does a good job of making Levi a whole person.

Is this a man? Yes. Yes it is.

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LapinTheRabbit
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Astounding. One of the most thorough and probing biographies I've ever read. In spite of the length and detail, it never deviates from the core of Levi's humanity.
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