A revealing companion to Levi’s own considerable body of work, and an uncommonly thoughtful example of biography as...
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.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11315-7
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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