Primo Levi, part 2

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How does one write the life of such a man? Mr. Thomson has done so with great 
— perhaps too great — respect, producing annals of a writer's life rather 
than an interpretation. He takes us through Levi's early years in Turin, an 
industrial city rooted in its own ways, famous for its distinctive dialect and 
foods (both dear to Levi). He traces the intricate genealogies that bound Levi to 
a large Jewish family, describes his career at school and university and 
follows him into the early, poorly organized Resistance unit that he joined in 
1943. Betrayal and capture soon followed, and then the terrible journey to 
Auschwitz, where Levi spent a year and a half.



Still young, he came home in 1946, and Mr. Thomson devotes most of his book, 
which appeared last year in Britain, to Levi's double career, as industrial 
chemist and executive in a company that made paints and coatings during Italy's 
postwar economic rise, and as a writer about the Holocaust and many other 
things. 



Brief, fact-packed sketches along the way illuminate the worlds that Levi 
inhabited: familial, scientific and literary. Clipped, lucid analyses highlight 
the sources from which he drew the ingredients of his art, from the literary 
drill he detested at school but which gave him the command of Dante that he 
portrayed so movingly in the Ulysses chapter of "If This Is a Man," to the 
Darwinian analysis of nature that served as one of his models for analyzing life in 
the camps. 



Mr. Thomson never pretends, as many biographers do, to know his subject 
better than he could. At times his discretion seems astounding, even admirable, as 
when he insists that Levi's many close relationships with women were asexual 
and refers to his subject consistently by his last name. 



Mr. Thomson's reserve enables him to deal frankly with Levi's emotional 
struggles and personal shortcomings, while avoiding the modern biographer's 
overpowering temptations: to treat his main character as a moral inferior or a 
patient to be diagnosed. 



Yet the accumulated facts sometimes take over and drive the narrative. Mr. 
Thomson interviewed Levi himself and a great many other people, from Levi's 
intimate friends to his hosts on junkets abroad. He chased every piece of paper to 
its final resting place in library or official file. And he spares the reader 
few of his findings. 






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