The Double Bond; The Life of Primo Levi

by Carole Angier

• ISBN13: 9780374113155
• ISBN10: 0374113157
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-05-22
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

One of the most eagerly awaited biographies of recent years: a searching life of the great Italian writer and witness to the Holocaust Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which includeSurvival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and the classicThe Periodic Table, he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born. Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched, vivid, and moving biography, which illuminates the design of Levi's interior life : how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. Carole Angier'sbiography of Jean Rhys (1990) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and won the Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction. She is the Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, and lives in Oxfordshire. Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which includeSurvival in Auschwitz,TheReawakening, and his autobiographical masterpieceThe Periodic Table, he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born. Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched biography, which illuminates the design of Levis interior life: how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but also between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. "[A] vastly detailed and intricately layered biography . . . Meticulous and visionary . . . Angier's critical appreciation is to my mind flawless."Richard Eder,The New York Times Book Review "[A] vastly detailed and intricately layered biography . . . Meticulous and visionary . . . Angier's critical appreciation is to my mind flawless."Richard Eder,The New York Times Book Review "Compelling and beautifully written . . . Ms. Angier's book is devoted to capturing the inner man as much as the outward circumstances of his life . . . [Her] detailed account of the ordeal in the camps is painstakingly presented and told with a respectful care."Erich Eichman,The Wall Street Journal "Brilliantly unorthodox . . . [Angier] is Levi's perfect biographera natural foil for his own reluctance to reveal his real selfand her work is the perfect complement to his, daring and justified in each of its own liberties . . . Her book is a remarkable success. Not only for its own achievement, but also because it restores to Levi's life the dignity his death seemed to betray."Alex Abramovich,The Village Voice "The Double Bondhas the pace and grip of a thriller. I could hardly out it down from the start to finish. Primo Levi was a natural storyteller whose fearful experiences in Auschwitz and elsewhere made him a great writer, and one of the twentieth century's

Author Biography

Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys (1990) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and won the Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction. She is the Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, and lives in Oxfordshire.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Illustration Acknowledgements	xi
Acknowledgements	xiii
Preface	xv
Introduction	xxiii
PART ONE
Paradiso	5	(32)
Paradise Lost	25	(12)
Botticelli Angels: 1919--30	37	(31)
The Hare and the Tortoise	56	(12)
Primo Levi Primo: 1930--37	68	(44)
The Hare and the Tortoise II	106	(6)
Chemistry: 1937--41	112	(55)
Alberto	161	(6)
Nickel: 1941--2	167	(28)
Burning	184	(11)
PART TWO
Milan: July 1942 -- 8 September 1943	195	(35)
Gabriella	224	(6)
Amay and Aosta: September 1943 --January 1944	230	(32)
Fossoli: February 1944	262	(20)
Auschwitz: 22 February 1944 -- 27 January 1945	282	(86)
The Truce: 27 January -- 19 October 1945	368	(51)
PART THREE
Levi Uomo 1945--7	419	(57)
Dancing	473	(3)
Levi Uomo II: 1948--63	476	(53)
Corso Re Umberto 75	517	(12)
Centaur: 1963--75	529	(62)
Lilith	585	(6)
Writer: 1975--85	591	(66)
The Double Bond	651	(6)
The Drowned and the Saved: 1986	657	(76)
The Double Bind: 1987	697	(36)
Notes	733	(114)
Bibliography	847	(18)
Index	865