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  • The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi
  • Joseph Farrell
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, edited by Robert S. C. Gordon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 205 pp. $29.95.

Survivor guilt is well documented, but there is a different, milder form of guilt, or uncertainty and embarrassment, which can affect people professionally charged with teaching or writing critically about Primo Levi or other writers of testimonial literature. It is given voice in this volume by professors Anna Laura and Giulio Lepschy in an essay on the languages and dialects employed by Levi. "Some readers may feel an unease at treating Primo Levi's work (and especially his writings about the camps) as literary objects rather than as texts [End Page 187] crucial for their ethical, political and historical value." Does analysis of him with routine critical tools carry the risk of diminishing the impact of his work on the greatest crime in human history?

The problem is particularly acute in the case of Levi, since he had a distaste for being pigeon-holed and was the author of several works which were not immediately related to his experiences in Auschwitz. The question of Levi's identity as a writer lies close to the surface of virtually all the chapters in this stimulating, excellent anthology. The editor, Robert Gordon, makes it clear that the objective is to consider Primo Levi in all his deeply layered complexity as a commentator on, and teller of tales about, such varied topics as "the risks and rewards of science, the nature of historical responsibility, the limits of the human, the workings of language and the ethics of everyday life." Levi's sensitive probing of these vital questions in essays, novels, and stories would of itself ensure him a place as one of the great writers of our time, but of course he was the man who endured Auschwitz and whose accounts and reflections on that experience are perhaps the greatest work of all testimonial literature.

In answering their own question, the professors Lepschy point out that ethical commitment is among the most fundamental criteria for the evaluation of any creative work which aims to be more than mere escapism, and that their essay examines Levi's engagement with language as it relates to his core concerns. The ethical imperative was central to Levi, but his interests were legion, and it is surely only in appreciating Levi in his totality that the fullness of his achievement can be celebrated.

All contributors are admirers, so this is not a work of revisionism, but each writer approaches him from a different standpoint. There are three essays on the Holocaust, including an account by Judith Woolf of Levi's treatment of the theme in different books and a chapter on "Holocaust Vocabularies" by Gordon and Marco Belpoliti which suggests that Levi's ethical interrogations of Auschwitz entitle him to be ranked with Pascal and Montaigne. Charlotte Ross takes as her theme Levi's sci-fi short stories, proposing that they act as "extensions to his writing about the Lager," but also pointing out that they focus on the "impotence of the individual before unaccountable forces," and that challenging comment immediately compels the reader to rethink Levi's fiction.

Mirna Cicioni advances the original view that he was in essays and stories a humorist, not quite in the Mark Twain mode, but in the style of a man gifted with a sense of the grotesque and the incongruous. Several contributors draw attention to the quasi-philosophical vision underpinning Levi's work, so while there is consensus on the ethical core of his outlook and agreement that not even the savagery of Auschwitz caused him to deviate from the tenets of western Humanism, he is variously described as a "sceptical humanist," as [End Page 188] an enlightened social critic, or as a "civilizing Liberal." He was an acute critic, who wrote with insight on writers as diverse as Jack London and François Rabelais. Pierpaolo Antonello, who focuses on the novel The Wrench, uncompromisingly sets him in the context of contemporary philosophy, discussing him as someone who almost but not quite developed an epistemology of his own. Jonathan Usher...

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