TBV (on hiatus)’s Reviews > Primo Levi: A Biography > Status Update

“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.]

“What was Levi’s favourite literary passage? Levi replied unhesitatingly that it was Prince Fabrizio’s deathbed scene in the Sicilian novel The Leopard.”

“Later on that evening, Levi was in Rome’s lavish Villa Giulia to attend the Strega awards ceremony. At the table next to him sat the screen idol Marcello Mastroianni and his director Michelangelo Antonioni, and all the Roman beau monde. Amid this glitter Levi confessed he felt like a ‘martian’. He was one of just three finalists.” [Nominated for his novel ‘Truce’ - Natalia Ginzburg won.]

“He was not attracted to self-consciously ‘creative’ authors, but chose instead the company of those who had another profession. Levi liked to see himself as part of a group of craftsman-like storytellers set apart from the letterati and letteratini, the literary peacocks who floated round Italy’s salons and media coteries.”

“No words were said as he left the mess-tin by the half-constructed brick wall. The soup might contain a sparrow’s wings, prune stones, salami rind, even bits of La Stampa newsprint reduced to pulp. The scrag-ends provided Levi with an extra daily 500 calories, without which he certainly would not have survived.”

“Violence was the universal shorthand of this place, the language understood by all.”

“This was the most violent air attack so far on any Italian city: 1,000 incendiary bombs – ‘carpet bombing’, the RAF called it – fell on the Piedmont capital. Driven by the wind, flames roared against the twin onion domes of the synagogue, reducing to ash a century of Jewish birth and death certificates.”

“In memory of that time Levi later wrote a short story, ‘Bear Meat’, a compilation of mountain experiences, in which his wrist-watch unaccountably stops as he lies shivering by Delmastro’s side: ‘as though time itself had frozen’.” [After mountaineering in the Valle d’Aosta]