Status Updates From Primo Levi: A Life

“New York, wrote Levi, has an ‘insolent, lyrical, cynical beauty’, and when he and Lucia arrived there on Friday 12 April 1985, the city overwhelmed them. Manhattan was in the grip of a jogging and calorie-counting mania, and the sight of people running in Central Park (often with dogs in tow) was extraordinary.”

“His choice in music proved conservative and included such stalwarts as Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony (a favourite of his father’s) and Bizet’s Carmen. Levi said he could listen to Carmen a thousand times, exceeding even Nietzsche (who saw the opera fourteen times in Turin).”

“The book is also very funny – for example in ‘Nitrogen’, where the author discusses the use of snake droppings in lipstick manufacture.” [‘The Periodic Table’ by Primo Levi, which is a set of stories each named after a chemical element, based on the author’s knowledge and experience as a chemist in a German concentration camp and after he was liberated.]