The 3 best books of Primo Levi

Years ago I went to see a play that delved into the character of Primo Levi y its fateful circumstances linked, as in a macabre fate, with the birth of Nazism and Fascism. Any ideology of a freethinker like him would end up being beaten and dragged by the suffering that he carried due to the fact of being born, as that visionary verse by Calderón de la Barca says: the major crime of man is to have been born...

Because Primo Levi was unlucky enough to be born at a time when half of Europe was going crazy, with one of its main focuses of madness on the Jewish people. And Primo Levi, of course, also had to be born Jewish to carry all the fatality on his shoulders, logically not because of his condition but because of the hatred directed towards that dehumanizing label of the race that had become a stigma. Nothing good can come from the coincidences accumulated towards ignominy. If anything, the brilliant and lucid, even blindness, testimony of a more than committed writer, committed to life, despite everything.

Primo Levi survived the extermination fields perhaps only to tell it with depth deeper than fear, as an eccehomo responsible, in his lyrics, for the last breath of a man crucified again by his fellow men. Regarding this idea of ​​an eccehomo adapted to the times of Nazism, perhaps you would be interested in taking a look at a short novel that I wrote at the time... here is the link to the book The arms of my cross, so you can look at it.

Top 3 recommended books by Primo Levi

if this is a Man

Cousin Levi was about to get it. From the first intimidation of the Jews to his outright genocide, a little more than the decade between 1935 and 1945 would pass. He was arrested in 1943 as soon as he jumped from his job as a miner (working as a chemist was impossible for him in Italy given his Jewish status), to the anti-fascist front.

From there directly to Monowice, a branch of Auschwitz when the sinister main hotel already had a full of guests constantly replenished from other fronts further west ...

The testimony narrated in these pages is considered of the most transcendent to reflect and give this committed testimony of which we spoke before about the idea of ​​dehumanization, of irrationality or rather of reason immersed in the pot of untimely hatred.

Together with Anne Frank's diary, this book introduces us to horror without any hint of fiction, to what we can reach above any perversion that, as humans, we all were in those fateful days.

if this is a Man

The star key

When an author of poso begins to write a novel that in principle only points to the personal adventure, to the peculiar journey around any character, finally the plot ends up addressing that existential point of detail, of the overloaded experiences of transcendent meditation , of sediment and wisdom.

The character of Libertini Faussone happens to be one of a great technician demanded by half the world to design and implement great mechanisms of a world that is advancing towards technification. He lives his great journeys with intensity and dedication to his profession, but without detracting from the attention to many other details and revealing himself as a survivor of ingenuity towards the pleasure of life.

The Latin mentality permeated with the ideal of a great German engineer, a character between two prototypes of the XNUMXth century European from the north and the south, and in the end also someone committed to life and its disparate aspects...

The star key

Natural stories

The story is always a challenge for those authors more given to the great profusion of ideas developed towards a final synthesis. Primo Levi himself once stated that writing stories or stories was an act of specific liberation in which he knew that he could not develop or take great notes, only allow himself to be carried away by a narrative impulse that would appease a moment of uncontrolled inspiration.

And thus this volume is born in which Primo Levi spreads his most imaginative gifts towards stories whose final moral may not be intended or directly conscious but which in the end does represent, in the case of the fifteen stories presented, an invitation to further consideration. natural of what we are or what we do in a world that is at times surreal, always tragic and filled with magical moments of humor and hope.

Natural Histories, Primo Levi
5/5 - (6 votes)

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