Primo Levi’s Universe:
a Writer’s Journey
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Primo Levi is most famous for his masterful memoirs of Auschwitz, including Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Yet Levi was also a scientist, poet, mountain climber, and novelist – in short, a Renaissance man. Since his mysterious death in 1987, Levi has been the subject of ever-increasing fascination and acclaim. This concise, lyrical book weaves the life and works together in a bold new interpretation of Levi’s uncanny wisdom – tragic and comic, Darwinist and fabulous, secular and Jewish – and how it evolved. Magavern persuades us that Levi’s works, read together, form a vital twentieth century testament about what it means to be a human being – an account forged in the midst of the brutal dehumanization of the concentration camps, but leavened and deepened by the misadventures, loves, sorrows, and joys of ordinary life.
Foreword by Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.
Afterword by Risa Sodi, author of Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing, 1944-1994 and A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz.
“Magavern, in clear careful language that Levi would appreciate, leads us through Levi's works and life, opening our ears and minds to a richer understanding of one of the most subtle and complex writers of the twentieth century.”
– Ann Goldstein
Editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi
and translator of Elena Ferrante
“This is a measured and sensitive . . . exploration of a complicated and tortured soul who desperately sought freedom throughout his lifetime.”
– Publishers Weekly
“The writing is . . . profoundly moving . . . What Magavern shows, with remarkable skill, is how Levi, the writer, managed to live in Auschwitz in a state Levi himself describes as ‘exceptional spiritedness.’“
– Jewish Book World
“An exemplary slender critical biography of a great 20th century writer,” “careful and elegant,” “remarkable.”
– Editor’s Choice, The Buffalo News
“Almost uncanny empathy . . . Apart from its honesty and its spirit of sympathetic inquiry, one of the joys of this rich volume, a blend of biography and analysis, is the generosity with which Magavern embraces Levi’s mind.”
–Hadassah Magazine