“With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi’s writing isn’t just his memory of the unbearable, but also in The Periodic Table and The Wrench, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known –Philip Roth
Primo Levi, a 23-year old chemist, was arrested in December 1943 and transported to Auschwitz in February 1944. There he remained until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. By February 1946, he had completed a first draft about the last ten days of his time in the camp, a section that would come to be the book’s last chapter, written “in furious haste”. Ten months later, there was a complete text, worked on “with love and rage”, reflecting a vow “never to forget”.– The Guardian
To buy this book please send me a message.
