Review by Choice Review
Angier (Univ. of Warwich, UK) wrote the award-winning biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990), but now her subject is a person who fled from the chaos of human affairs more than most writers--which makes this study more speculative than definitive. Members of Levi's family found Angier's search for intimate details vulgar and refused to see her. A chemist who masterfully used scientific metaphors to capture the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz and claimed he understood the affinities of elements far more than those of humans, Levi was not without guilt for the pollution he allowed to happen while working for industry. Angier's title refers to the unstable double bond of organic chemistry and the double bind of psychology, typical of the lopsided relationships Levi had with friends who embodied what he lacked. Angier does not fail to provide critical examination of individual works, but although she credits Levi's debt to Dante and Rabelais she scants more modern authors like Paul Celan and Carlo Porta. Angier attributes Levi's mysterious death in 1987 at age 67, after an unobserved lunge from the stairwell of his third-floor apartment in Turin, to his ever-worsening chronic depression. Recommended to all libraries for the sheer quantity of its detail. J. Shreve Allegany College of Maryland
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
The story of Levi's private life is what's new in this monumental biography of the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, from his painfully shy childhood through his difficult relationships with people he never wrote about (including his mother and his wife) and his lifelong struggle with the depression that Angier believes drove him to suicide at age 67. She describes her years of exhaustive research, including some secret interviews with his intimate friends. Yet, for most readers, the drama of this book will still be Levi's public persona, his Holocaust experience and how he wrote about it--never stopped writing about it--all his life. Angier's long, gripping narrative of Levi's time in Auschwitz synthesizes the best of his memoirs, poetry, fiction, essays, and scientific writing. She shows and tells that he was "not just a great witness but a great artist; and the first because the second." Just as compelling is her discussion of the moral issues he raises about the "gray zone" of human behavior, the shame of the drowned and the saved, the roles of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. The heartbreaking stories of the brave and broken people he had known in the camps, of how Levi and his friends helped each other and saved others, will send readers right back to his own writing. A compelling biography and a must for all Holocaust collections. --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
History will remember Jewish-Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1986) as a seminal chronicler of the Holocaust one of the first and certainly one of the most memorable. But in undertaking his biography, Angier (Jean Rhys: Life and Work) faced a host of obstacles: the tight-knit, impenetrable community of Turin, Levi's native city; a closemouthed family; inaccessible papers. There was also the hurdle of Levi's own fictionalized alter ego always true to character, but rarely an exact match with the facts. Angier deftly fills the lacunae with recollections and anecdotes drawn from her research. Her skillful narrative illuminates not only the painful, dramatic passages of her subject's life his work in the partisan resistance, his extraordinary survival in Auschwitz but also the decades after the war that Levi spent as a chemical specialist in varnishes and resins, quietly issuing works of literary genius (If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved) every now and then. Always sensitive to the historical context of her subject, Angier provides a macroscopic view of the war from the perspective of Italian Jewry. But she also explicates some of the more difficult, ambiguous aspects of Levi's temperament: his fear of women, his tendency to see chemistry as a metaphor for life, the fierce determination to bear witness that underlay his gentle nature, and the inner torment that eventually drove him to suicide. Anyone moved by Levi's accounts of heroism and atrocity will learn much from this nuanced biography. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Angier's definitive biography of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (1919-87) will be superseded only if the immediate family speaks out and Levi's private papers are made public. An Italian Jew from Turin who was trained as a chemist, Levi led a life of personal anguish and historic catastrophe; he was arrested by Italian Fascists during World War II and deported to Auschwitz, where he was imprisoned in 1944-45. Angier (Jean Rhys) traces Levi's life and friendships with care and great respect, exploring the psychological aspects of his relationships with his wife and his mother and the composition of such works as Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table. All the great names from Levi's writings on the camps are here Lorenzo, Pikolo, Alberto as Angier interviews the living, revisits the scenes, and reads Levi's work intensely. Ten years in the making, this book alternates between chapters of straightforward narration, with a close reading of Levi's works, and chapters of Angier's personal observations and thoughts about Levi. The passages on Auschwitz and Levi's suicide are invaluable additions to our understanding of this important author's work. Essential for Jewish studies and literature collections. Gene Shaw, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
English biographer Angier (Jean Rhys, 1991) gracefully explores the life of the great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor. "Auschwitz killed him 40 years later," declared newspaper headlines when Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 68. Elie Wiesel, Bruno Bettelheim, and other witnesses to genocide concurred, as if to say "even Primo Levi could not survive Auschwitz after all." But Levi, who chronicled his concentration camp years in such books as The Truce and If This Is a Man, was not driven to kill himself by the haunting memories of that horrible time, writes Angier. Instead, she reveals, the fear of infirmities brought on by advancing years, a gnawing unhappiness over the state of the world, a difficult relationship with an imperious mother, and a lifelong tendency to melancholy all combined to drive the writer to fatal despair. The author knows her subject well and has brought exhaustive research to her task-a difficult one, given Levi's famous reserve. Angier does not share his reticence, and if there's a flaw here, it's that she too often inserts herself as an actor in the narrative. As she wrestles with questions of how much to reveal of Levi's life, for example, she describes it as a story that "upset some of the clearer ideas of good and evil, some of the higher hopes of human nature that he'd helped us to hang on to, despite everything." Still, this is a rich, nuanced portrait of a man who lived through the worst horrors imaginable without betraying his fellow sufferers, who carried those memories for four decades, and who survived for as long as he did, as Angier says, "because he decided from the beginning or very near it to observe, understand, and remember every detail of this world." A revealing companion to Levi's own considerable body of work, and an uncommonly thoughtful example of biography as literature in its own right.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
