Primo Levi, part 3

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No vacation at the beach or in the mountains goes unrecounted, as Mr. Thomson 
follows his quarry up and down the mountains, to the ocean and back, to 
dinner and home, telling us what was eaten and drunk and even what sort of 
apartment his other characters lived in. Unlike Levi, Mr. Thomson has not imposed an 
artistic shape on the mass of personal and historical experience that he 
surveys. 



Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee, those master biographers, have shown that 
this much-abused genre can shed light not only on individuals, but also on the 
worlds they inhabited, like Bloomsbury, the habitat of Lytton Strachey and 
Virginia Woolf. Naturally Mr. Thomson makes no effort to rival Levi in describing 
life and death at Auschwitz. 



But he could have described the Turin that Levi came from as an 
intellectually exciting city, bursting with politically engaged and cosmopolitan 
intellectuals. Those who survived Fascism, invasions and civil war did much to create 
the spectacular postwar revival of Italian culture. 



Both Primo Levi and Carlo Levi — the painter (unrelated) who wrote another of 
the great, shocking books of postwar Italy, "Christ Stopped at Eboli" — 
sparked critical reflection on Fascism and the war in Italy, at a time when debate 
was much more muted elsewhere. Did this have something to do with the 
particular Piedmontese world from which they were torn into their radically different 
exiles? 



Mr. Thomson could have asked questions like these, and offered more detailed 
answers, without demeaning his subject. By doing so he could have made his 
book not only a chronicle of one man's life, but a larger inquiry — of the sort 
that occupied Levi himself — into the ways in which a particular society shapes 
minds and souls.











 

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