The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961 - 1987

by Primo Levi (Holocaust Survivor, Writer and Scientist); Editor: Marco Belpoliti (Independent Scholar); Editor: Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge)

• ISBN13: 9780745621494
• ISBN10: 074562149X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-01
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Over the course of more than twenty-five years, Primo Levi gave more than two hundred newspaper, journal, radio and television interviews speaking with such varied authors as Philip Roth and Germaine Greer. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon have selected and translated thirty-six of the most important of these interviews for The Voice of Memory.We recognize the voice familiar to us from Levi's masterpieces, from The Periodic Table to The Drowned and the Saved. But we also see a fuller, more varied and more complex picture of the writer famously shrouded in his past. There is Levi the Holocaust witness; Levi the writer; Levi the intellectual; Levi the political polemicist; and Levi the atheist and Jew, holding onto his Jewish culture while rejecting the symbols of a faith he could not share.Levi emerges in a rich, contradictory and essentially human light. He was a classic figure out of place. As he put it, 'I am an amphibian, a centaur.I live with this paranoiac split'. Levi's status as perhaps the most important of the survivor-writers of the Holocaust is enhanced still further by his many voices speaking in this remarkable book.This volume will be of considerable interest to all readers of Primo Levi's work, as well as to students and scholars of contemporary literature.

Table of Contents

Preface: Robert Gordon. `I am a Centaura' Marco Belpoliti

Editors' Note

English Encounters

Germaine Greer Talks to Primo Levi (1985)

A Man Saved by His Skills: Philip Roth (1986)

Primo Levi in London: Anthony Rudolph (1986)

Primo Levi in Conversation: Ian Thomson (1987)

Life

The Little Theatre of Memory (1982)

Turin (1980)

Mountaineering (1984)

Chemistry (1983)

The Sinister Power of Science (1987)

Poetry and Computers (1985)

Me. Old? (1982)

Books

The Truce (1963)

Science Fiction (1966/1971)

The Periodic Table (1975)

The Wrench (1979)

La Ricerca delle Radici (The Search for Roots) (1981)

If Not Now, When? (1982)

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Literature and Writing

A Mysterious Necessity (1972)

A Conversation with Primo Levi (1979)

Interview for a Dissertation(1981)

An Encounter with Primo Levi (1981)

An Assault Called Franz Kafka (1983)

Primo Levi (1984)

The Essential and the Superfluous (1987)

Auschwitz and Survival

The Jewish Question (1961)

A Self-Interview, Afterword to If This is a Man (1976)

Return to Auschwitz (1982)

The Duty of Memory (1983)

Words, Memory, Hope (1984)

Judaism and Israel

Jewish Up to a Point (1976)

Interview with Primo Levi (1979)

God and I (1983)

Primo Levi: Begin Should Go (1982)

If This is a State (1984)

Bibliography of Levi's Works In Italian and English

Index

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