Primo Levi

An Italian chemist who helped form an Antifascist partisan group that fought against the Republic of Salo before he was captured. Along with other Jewish Italian POWs he was transported to Auschwitz in early 1944. Due to his training as a chemist, he was in time put to work in the IG Farben plants there that allowed him to survive the war. After his eventual return to Italy, he again took up his professional career as a chemist. Later in life, as a way of trying to come to terms with the experience of Auschwitz he was driven to write. Many thousands of survivors have written accounts of their experiences in the Nazi concentration camps with varying effectiveness. Primo's account and his subsequent writings stand practically in a class of their own, however. Not because of the experiences he shared with many other survivors but in the unique quality of his writing that is best discovered through reading his primary account in "If This Is A Man" and "The Truce" and subsequent books like "If Not Now, Then When?", "Moments of Reprieve", "The Periodic Table" and "The Drowned and the Saved".

What is unique about his voice? Many have pointed to the contrast between the unparalleled horror of the holocaust that threatens to overwhelm all belief in human values and Levi's reassertion of not only human but humane values. This combines with the almost crystalline clarity and simplicity of his prose that is, even during the unflinching examination of previously unimagined degradation, somehow still filled by a life-asserting humanism. The challenge of trying to describe Primo's inimitable style in your own words is as hopeless as watching an advert for a new breakthrough in high-definition colour TV through a pinhole camera.

But the combination of the subject matter, unparalleled prose style, and perspective redeems our faith in humanity. A faith threatened as never before by the monstrous shadow of the abomination it confronts with a passion not contorted by bitterness, and a tone that is uncompromising but humble, which in comparison to all studied authority, seems a pitiable over-loud blustering of poorly-concealed terror. [That isn't clear. What is the subject of the verb "seems"?]

Despite the fact that to point to a single writer is to deny the truism that the true wealth of human writing and language is realized only in the form of a multitude of voices, if I were forced to chose a "Greatest Writer of the 20th Century" I would pick PrimoLevi without hesitation. When you're ready to turn off the monitor and pick up something that can teach you a lesson in what real writing is capable of, try Primo if you haven't already.

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