La Tregua – Primo Levi

 

I’ve stolen this book from my granddad’s bookshelf. It was a gift for him by my mom some 20 years ago. His memory is really rather wobbly now, I don’t think he’ll realize it’s gone (or, sadly, that he’s ever read it).

I’ve read it because my mother – rightfully, as is sometimes the case! – scolded me for saying that often Levi’s writing is (understandably, obviously) quite humourless. I stand by what I said in relation to books about the holocaust. But La Tregua is more than that. It’s about the long journey home, about the light at the end of the tunnel, about the desire to live. Also, La Tregua was written in the early 1960s, 15 years after Se Questo E’ un Uomo, and I’m sure that this played an important role in the way in which Levi recalled his turbulent days in 1945 and 1946.

Levi’s self-mocking when describing his lack of street smarts is endearing, the plethora of secondary characters with very often stereotypical national quirks is extremely funny (at times actually hilarious), and the never-ending road back to Turin is of such an epic and heroic kind that I am sure McCarthy would love to have written La Tregua. And, clearly, the anecdotes that Levi magisterially recalls in La Tregua are of the kind which can only be lived and told by the chosen people.

Se Questo E’ un Uomo – Primo Levi

Without a doubt Primo Levi’s most famous book. Given the topic (the author’s experience in the Nazi concentration camps) it’s really hard to write anything about it, and even more to offer any sort of vague critique. We were strongly encouraged to read the book in high-school (by the time I had already read it), but I think we should have all been forced to do so.

From a sociological and anthropological point of view, the book offers a unique insight into human relations in the direst of situations. Yet, at the same time, the book ultimately doesn’t cast a moral judgement on the persecutors, something that I found extremely surprising.

I first read it when I was 13 or 14, and I remember being really shocked when I realized that often in concentration camps the ones more likely to die soon were the strongest men, capable of doing the hardest jobs and incapable of doing them without using their full strength. The frequent references to the Divine Comedy made me want to read some of its key “Canti” already then, when I was surely too young to understand them.

I don’t think that someone who has survived to tell this tale then decided to kill himself more than 40 years later. But maybe I’m just naive...

Cristo Si E’ Fermato a Eboli – Carlo Levi

And who would have thought – another one of the books that I’ve read while pretending to do some ground-breaking historical research. Carlo Levi was a true renaissance man in some grim times in Italy: a supremely talented writer, a great (if too often underrated) painter, and a key figure in the development of anti-Fascism.

This is a book in which nothing, or at least close to nothing, happens. But it’s a short one, so I didn’t mind its uneventfulness, and it’s also a perfect depiction of both life in such an isolated place as Gagliano (Aliano in real life) and of life in internal exile. And the title of the book is one of the best ones I’ve ever come across: Gagliano is so remote that not even Christ has ever managed to reach it (an idiomatic Italian expression) as he stopped in the town of Eboli, a few kilometres away.

Il Sistema Periodico – Primo Levi

 

One of the books I’ve read to distract myself as I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on Italian Fascism while still feeling like I was doing some academic work (I might have even thrown a couple of cheeky references to this collection of short stories for good measure).

Having only read works by Levi that had been marked by the Holocaust, it was rather refreshing to read stories about Levi’s life before WWII, finding even a trace of humour every now and then – something so sadly absent in most of his books.

I am not a fan of short stories, I never have enough time to be drawn into them, and I am by no means a scientist (like Levi was, and he titled every short story in this collection with the name of an element on the periodic table) so I think I missed a number of the book’s subtleties. Still, I liked it nonetheless.