Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Complete Works of Primo Levi

Rate this book
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Library Journal
A Holiday Gift Guide Selection in the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection The Complete Works of Primo Levi , which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table , finally gathers all fourteen of Levi’s books―memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction―into three slipcased volumes. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence,” has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man , his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi’s body of work extends considerably beyond his experience as a survivor. Now, the transformation of Levi from Holocaust memoirist to one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers culminates in this publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi . This magisterial collection finally gathers all of Levi’s fourteen books―memoirs, essays, poetry, and fiction―into three slip-cased volumes. Thirteen of the books feature new translations, and the other is newly revised by the original translator. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison introduces Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” The appearance of this historic publication will occasion a major reappraisal of “one of the most valuable writers of our time” (Alfred Kazin). The Complete Works of Primo Levi features all new translations The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, The Truce, Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, The Wrench, Lilith, Other People’s Trades , and If Not Now, When? ―as well as all of Levi’s poems, essays, and other nonfiction work, some of which have never appeared before in English.

3008 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2015

200 people are currently reading
1060 people want to read

About the author

Primo Levi

172 books2,224 followers
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor whose literary work has had a profound impact on how the world understands the Holocaust and its aftermath. Born in Turin in 1919, he studied chemistry at the University of Turin and graduated in 1941. During World War II, Levi joined the Italian resistance, but was captured by Fascist forces in 1943. Because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, where he endured ten harrowing months before being liberated by the Soviet army.
After the war, Levi returned to Turin and resumed work as a chemist, but also began writing about his experiences. His first book, If This Is a Man (published in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz), is widely regarded as one of the most important Holocaust memoirs ever written. Known for its clarity, restraint, and moral depth, the book offers a powerful testimony of life inside the concentration camp. Levi went on to write several more works, including The Truce, a sequel recounting his long journey home after liberation, and The Periodic Table, a unique blend of memoir and scientific reflection, in which each chapter is named after a chemical element.
Throughout his writing, Levi combined scientific precision with literary grace, reflecting on human dignity, morality, and survival. His later works included fiction, essays, and poetry, all characterized by his lucid style and philosophical insight. Levi also addressed broader issues of science, ethics, and memory, positioning himself as a key voice in post-war European literature.
Despite his success, Levi struggled with depression in his later years, and in 1987 he died after falling from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. While officially ruled a suicide, the exact circumstances of his death remain a subject of debate. Nevertheless, his legacy endures. Primo Levi’s body of work remains essential reading for its deep humanity, intellectual rigor, and unwavering commitment to bearing witness.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
115 (74%)
4 stars
28 (18%)
3 stars
5 (3%)
2 stars
0 (0%)
1 star
6 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for Greg.
545 reviews132 followers
December 21, 2024
Indelibly shaped by his experience in Auschwitz, also by how he arrived there and made his way back to home, Turin, Italy, Primo Levi, a professional chemist who seemingly willed himself to become the most insightful of writers, embraced his memories to deepen and articulate timeless truths and insights in ways that any reader could understand to apply to their own lives.

What little I previously knew of Levi was based on commentary of his first book, his autobiographical remembrance of surviving Auschwitz. I mistakenly thought that his writing focused on the Holocaust. It does, but it expands into all the things that inspire him, a survivor, a chemist, a philosopher, a historian, an Italian, a Jew, a husband, a speculator that somewhat distills into science fiction. He was indeed, as was often said about the music of Duke Ellington, beyond category as was confirmed in the first of the interpretive essays concluding the works, Primo Levi in America , which describes the long road of getting Levi’s writing in front of a larger American audience. Largely ignored up until the early 1980s, The Periodic Table “had been rejected by more than twenty American publishers.” A literary critic who tried to champion it remembered, “some told me it was not a good chemistry book, while others told me that there was too much chemistry for the book to be a personal memoir.” Another agent who had purchased the rights to seven of Levi’s books recalled,
When I presented If Not Now, When?, I stood up to say that I had a book about the Holocaust, and sales estimates shrank. When I said it was written in Italian, they shrank even further, and even more so when I said that it was literary. I had to tell people that there are just some books that are in no category, Jewish or otherwise, that they are just great books, and this is how I represented it in America.”
When Saul Bellow read The Periodic Table for the first time, he remarked, “It is wonderfully pure.” It was only by April 1984 that Levi “finally achieved the commercial success that had previously eluded” him. Sadly, he only experienced it for three years. He died on April 11, 1987, the coroner ruling it death by suicide, but whether this is true is still unclear today. I have listed the volumes backwards below, because the final volume make everything that came before as profound as anything I have read in my life.

Volume Three

Collected Poems

Poems authored by one who admits to not being a poet is probably shouldn’t be reviewed by one who rarely reads poetry. I did, however, get a lot out of them. The poems from the fifties are still mostly reflective of his time before, during and after Auschwitz. After that, they are more about the things he observes every day in Turin, either at leisure or at work. Excerpt from essay on Rudolf Höss:
Serving in the SS included an intensive and skillful “reeducation” that flattered the recruits’ ambition. These, mostly ignorant, frustrated outcasts felt valued and exalted. The uniform was elegant, the pay was good, the power almost limitless impunity guaranteed…Höss and his deputy have the bright idea of trying Zyklon B, the poison used to kill rats and roaches, and that works well. After a test carried out on nine hundred Russian prisoners, Höss feels “greatly encouraged”: the mass execution is successful, in terms of both quantity and quality – no blood, no traumas. There is a fundamental difference between machine-gunning naked people at the edge of a ditch they have dug themselves and throwing a little box of poison in an air duct…
And a final one that should make us all think about our public priorities:
Obviously, the year of the child [1979] originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows. And yet love for children is inscribed in us; the proximity of child, even an unknown child, makes us responsible, brings us joy, strength and peace of mind.
Other People’s Trades

This book is a collection of commentaries Levi wrote over a thirty years for the Turin newspaper La Stampa. I’ll keep it short and sweet. Sort of like every piece in it, some of the best, most profound writing I have ever read. Eclectic topics – personal “dilettantism” as Levi summarizes them – each filled with a chemist’s (Levi’s profession) precise insight, with one potential epigram after another for aspiring writers. I feel as though I could write volumes trying to describe and interpret them. But it wouldn’t come close to being in the same vicinity of each piece. It was worth reading a couple thousand pages to get here. Is my love of this book clear yet?

Stories and Essays

Anne Milano Appel’s introduction of the Translator’s Afterword of this short anthology best sums up my feelings about it and the preceding piece, which was so profound I couldn’t find the words to express my heartfelt love and admiration of Levi’s late, short writings. “I came to Levi’s Stories and Essays having only read his more sobering works. So when I read the Stories it was like meeting an old friend after a long time and being surprised by aspects of him that I hadn’t noticed. What struck me as the most refreshing was the playfulness and whimsy I found in some of the pieces I found – so very different from the Lager encounters – along with a touching humility.” Touching, playfulness, whimsy, refreshing – perfect descriptions – but the experience of the Auschwitz Lagers is never far away, even if never mentioned.

One of the best examples of rascal in Levi is the fictional trademark “patent application” submitted in the “Grand Duchy of Neustria” for the “PARACHRONO,” an invention that alters perceptions of time, for example:
A night spent in a state of insomnia is longer than a night spent sleeping, though up to now, as far as I know, no quantitative research has been carried out. As everyone knows, subjective time lengthens enormously if clocks or chronometers are consulted frequently.
The PARACHRONO is “A method of accelerating, slowing down, or arresting the subjective time of a subject.” Prisoners would perceive a long sentence as a blink of any eye, one could watch mushrooms “literally grow before my eyes,” and extend the length of an experience orgasm as long as desired.

Just a few pages later, in The Commander of Auschwitz, an essay about Rudolf Höss, the commander of the concentration camp when Levi was there, he writes:
He belongs to the most dangerous human species of this century. If you consider it, without men like him, without the Hösses, the Eichmans, the Kesselrings, and the thousand other loyal, blind men who carried out orders, the savage beasts, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, would have been impotent and disarmed. Their names would not figure in history; they would have passed like shadowy meteors through Europe’s dark sky. Instead, the opposite occurred: as history has shown us, the seed sown by these dark apostles took deep root in Germany, in all classes, with alarming speed, and led to a proliferation of hatred that continues to poison Europe and the world today.
If only Levi were alive today to tell such truths about the Idiot, the American symbol of global fascism. As horrible as he is, it’s his minions that scare me. They live around me, they smile with thumbs up over the graves of relatives buried in the most sacred cemetery in the nation, they thrive under the incompetence of a lazy, profit-driven press. The proliferation of poison is reemerging globally and we have no Primo Levi to point out its toxic absurdity.

The Drowned and the Saved

Levi’s last book, published months before his death, should be read together with his first, If This Is A Man. This collection of essays are his philosophical reflections about the meaning of the death camps, both then and for contemporary life. The essay Shame is the highlight. Every sentence reads like an epigraph. This paragraph from the final essay, however, is a prescient call to us and eternity:
It can happen anywhere. I do not mean nor can I say that it will happen. As I’ve noted, it’s unlikely that all the factors that triggered the Nazi madness could occur again, and simultaneously. But some precursory signs are appearing. Violence, “useful” or “useless,” is before our eyes. It is spreading, through sporadic private incidents and government lawlessness, in the two areas customarily known as the first and the second worlds, that is to say, in parliamentary democracies and Communist-bloc countries. In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. All that is needed is a new two-bit actor (there is no shortage of candidates) to mobilize the violence, legalize it, declare it necessary and just, and infect the world with it. Few countries can be guaranteed immunity from a future wave of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic claims, religious or political fanaticism, or racial friction. We thus need to sharpen our senses and distrust the prophets, the charismatics, the persons who speak and write “fancy words” without the backing of sound reasons.
Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981-1987

Wide-ranging until the end. Essays reflecting on the meaning of the Holocaust—often contains in introduction to other books and translated editions of his own. Unbelievably humorous and insightful “interviews” between a journalist and a seagull, an e. coli bacteria, and a giraffe, comparing how paint dries with a spider that immediately turns liquid into web strings which harden by friction at the point it leaves the body, and an insightful essay on cells explaining why thalidomide’s tragedy could have been averted if its discoverers had known a little more about chemistry.

Volume Two:

The Periodic Table

Reading summaries on Amazon and Goodreads, one would be led to believe that this is an autobiographical work and an “an impassioned response to the Holocaust.” Don’t let those descriptions fool you. Some do, but this is a collection of short stories, reminiscences, speculations, and most of all, tangents. There is no guiding theme other than the naming of each chapter after a chemical element, each with profound sociopolitical commentary:
This Bortolasso was a middle-aged laborer, strong as a mule and dirty as a boar. He couldn’t have been a pure idiot: it’s more likely that he belonged to that human type of which it’s said in Piedmont that they play the fool in order not to pay taxes. Sheltered by the immunity granted to the weak of mind, Bortolasso performed his job as a gardener with extreme negligence. It was a negligence that bordered on a primitive astuteness: all right, the world had declared him irresponsible, no it must put up with him as such, in fact provide for and take care of him.
Most endearing is a story about a prehistoric wanderer with a gift of finding and manipulating lead, sharing it during his travels. The most autobiographical story is about being in Italy after Mussolini fell and before Levi was sent to Auschwitz, describing the effects of fascism, a timely lesson for today:
To write melancholy, crepuscular poems, and not even very good ones, while the world was in flames, seemed to us neither strange nor shameful: we proclaimed ourselves enemies of fascism, but in fact fascism had worked in us, as in almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.And his thoughts about what the administrative, bureaucratic trivialities of working do to us, often without our cognition, become literary:
…at that time I hadn’t yet become acquainted with the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hamper, muffle, blunt every flash of intuition and every spark of intelligence.As one who never really “got” science, Levi goes on to write with a passion about chemistry, had I been exposed to it as a young person, still wouldn’t have led me to study science, but it would have sparked a respect for the beauty and poetry behind it.

The Wrench

I was into four stories of this collection before figuring out what was going on. As the translator explains in his summary notes, these stories are about work,
Work is fiction’s greatest blind spot. Work occupies more of our hours than sleep, love, and family, yet it’s rare to find a novel that takes as its main subject the daily routines, obligations and petty indignities that consume most of our lives…The earliest novels, written by people wealthy enough not to have to work, tended to be about the lives of people wealthy enough not to have to work. The subject of work has been largely avoided ever since…
This is a fun collection, mostly consisting of extended monologues of his colleague, a construction specialist who gets to travel the world. I get the sense that Levi used this as a writing exercise, to force himself within certain literary constraints. Not classic literature, but very interesting.

Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949-1980

More of a Auschwitz-focused collection, although that’s the wrong description for uncollected stories and essays. It seems many of the later pieces are written for a regular column Levi had in La Stampa, a Turinese newspaper. Refuting and expressing exasperation about a growing denialism of the Holocaust itself, which had a moment in the late 1970s/early 1980s, became an overriding theme. And surely, fewer readers associated him with the writer of short stories about science fiction, work, or growing up. These are a great way to see a less practiced and edited Levi.

Lilith and Other Stories

One of the many beauties of these collected works is seeing the writer, Primo Levi, desperately trying to carve his identity apart from Primo Levi, the man. And I think there are two major parts to this writer. One, like the unwelcome wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, feels compelled by history and responsibility to share both his experiences and insights, either through essays or episodic short stories. The other has no rules; he wants to share his fascination of chemistry, people he knows or experiences he has, and see where his speculations take him. This one is not bound by any duty other than that of the writer. This is a broad sampler of how Levi’s intellect was both wide and articulate.

If Not Now, When?
”Come to think of it, you look Jewish, too. We’ve seen some strange things, but this beats them all: a band of Jews wandering around Poland with weapons stolen from the Poles, passing themselves off as partisans, the sons of bitches!”
How is it possible that this, Levi’s only novel, has never come to my attention before? That it hasn’t been made into a movie? Perhaps because it was published in the early 1980s. Had it been in the 1960s, it would have fit in nicely with WWII-themed movies of the decade; Richard Burton or Clint Eastwood and a bunch of other stock actors come to mind. And it’s a story that few know about. Small gangs of partisans fighting invading Nazis and collaborating locals. In this case it’s in the closing year of the war and the first months of peace and an amalgamation of Jews as they make their way from Russia to Italy in hopes of one day making it to Palestine.

Along the way they link and separate with other groups, experience tragedies, minor triumphs, the foibles of human relationships before finally making their way to an empty rail car to take the thirty-or-so survivors to Italy. Having been forced to fight and live beyond the margins of society for years, assimilating to normalcy can only be achieved by arriving in Palestine. We are confident that they will, although it will be a different type of struggle awaiting them.

Volume One:

If This Is a Man

Levi's account of being torn from Turin and eventually ending up in one of Auschwitz's satellite camps is preferable to be to most of the first-person narratives coming out of this era. I find it especially more enlightening than, for example, Elie Wiesel's Night. Levi describes what happened to him and him alone. He does not speculate or draw vast conclusions about humanity. His is an account of the grim day-to-day realities of life in the camp. He describes only what he sees and experiences. And frankly, even that, at times, is almost too much for the reader to bear. All in all, one of the more satisfying, if that is the right word, and enlightening works of concentration camp literature.

The Truce

Picking up from the liberation of Auschwitz, Levi recounts the roundabout, frustrating, and illogical trip back to Turin. Mostly forgotten among the stories of the liberation of concentration camps are the stories of what actually happened to the those freed. Many had the "rationality" of be being shuttled to and resettled through displacement (DP)camps. Most were left to their own devices and efforts, and the struggle to survive was as disconcerting and unsettling as life in the camps. Many died anonymous deaths, some never made it home, making do with what fate offers. Others lived by their wits and survived individual odysseys worthy of mythology before reaching destinations of anti-climactic normalcy. An understated classic.

Natural Histories

More science than fiction from the perspective of the early 21st century. Most stories revolve around a salesman in Italy who works for an American firm based in Oklahoma, which invent and manufacture machines, like one that makes copies of anything. A coworker modifies it, making a perfect copy of his wife, which leads to many problems, but not as one might first imagine. The gadgets disturb life, making the reader wonder if they are curses, but become part of the fabric of personal and social lives.

Flaw of Form

Picking up themes from the previous collection about changing technologies and their impact on individuals and society. These are somehow deeper, some written from the perspective of civilizations, both terrestrial and beyond, creating social commentary with questions to be applied to any era. Some require repeated readings, not for their complexity, but to grasp their deep profundity.
Profile Image for Lori L (She Treads Softly) .
2,812 reviews115 followers
September 29, 2015
The Complete Works of Primo Levi is a very highly recommended three volume set of the works of Primo Levy. Years in the making, this set represents a monumental endeavor and fitting tribute to Primo Levy. This is the definitive English translation collection.

Known to English-speaking readers mainly for his writings on the Holocaust, Primo Levy "did not want to be characterized only as a Holocaust writer, and the label does him a regrettable injustice, for he was also a prolific writer of stories, essays, novels, and poems, on a wide range of scientific, literary, and autobiographical subjects."

As the introduction from the editor says, "These new volumes, by presenting Levi in all his facets, will enable English-speaking readers to encounter for the first time the entire range of his versatile, inventive, curious, crystalline intelligence, will enable English-speaking readers to enrich their knowledge of Levi. In doing so, they will discover a writer they may not have known, one whom Italo Calvino called among 'the most important and gifted writers of our time.'" The volumes are arrange chronologically and contain many works that were hard to find or previously left untranslated into English. There are notes from the translators after many of the selections.

The three volumes include:

VOLUME I
Editor's Introduction
Ann Goldstein Chronology
Ernesto Ferrero Editor's Acknowledgments
1. IF THIS IS A MAN Translated by Stuart Woolf
2. THE TRUCE Translated by Ann Goldstein
3. NATURAL HISTORIES Translated by Jenny McPhee
4. FLAW OF FORM Translated by Jenny McPhee

VOLUME II
1. THE PERIODIC TABLE Translated by Ann Goldstein
2. THE WRENCH Translated by Nathaniel Rich
3. UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1949-1980 Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli
4. LILITH Translated by Ann Goldstein
5. IF NOT NOW, WHEN? Translated by Antony Shugaar

VOLUME III
1. COMPLETE POEMS Translated by Jonathan Galassi
2. OTHER PEOPLE'S TRADES Translated by Antony Shugaar
3. STORIES AND ESSAYS Translated by Anne M. Appel
4. THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED Translated by Michael Moore
5. UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1981-1987 Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli
Primo Levi in America
Robert Weil Notes on the Texts
Domenico Scarpa About the Translators

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Liveright Publishing for review purposes.
Profile Image for Self-propelled.
68 reviews2 followers
April 15, 2017
This three-volume set presents Levi’s entire body of published work: his recollections of life before, during and after his incarceration in the Buchenwald Lager; his fiction, including his novel If Not Now, When? and his science fiction short stories; his poetry; and a great deal of other stories, essays, book reviews and letters. For someone like me, who has for years venerated Levi's writings on life in the camps and their aftermath along with his science-memoir masterpiece The Periodic Table, this collection reveals the astonishing breadth of Levi's literary output.

Perhaps most interestingly for those searching for ways to know Levi, the set includes many published and unpublished letters. For example, Levi addresses the misguided question "why was there no resistance in the camps?” (in fact, amazingly, there were acts of resistance, both violent and more subtle, but the question would not be asked by anyone who understood the conditions of the Lagers). The core of Levi's work remains the incomparable If This Is A Man, supplemented by The Truce and The Drowned and The Saved. Start with these, and enjoy Levi's unsentimental, clear, beautiful descriptions of a monstrous world:

To reenter Bude, we have to cross a space cluttered with piles of girders and metal frames. The steel cable of a winch cuts across our path, and Alex [the Kapo in charge of Levi's Kommando or squad of prisoners] grabs hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand, black with thick grease. In the meantime I have joined him. Without hatred and without contempt, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the innocent brute Alex, if someone told him that today I judge him on the basis of this action, him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, great and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.
Profile Image for Christine.
7,151 reviews558 followers
September 29, 2019
I might right a more formal review later, but for now - you can see why he was such a great writer. I love that he embraces Sci-Fi as well as the short stories that are interviews with animals.

The poetry is good too.

Toni Morrison's intro is her standard brilliance.
73 reviews
March 3, 2016
Levi was a survivor of Auschwitz who lived in Italy and worked as a chemist by training and profession much of his life. I read and highly recommend 4 pieces from Levi's 2500 pages of complete works: If this is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and Drowned and the Saved. Much of his work provides a calm (dispassionate?) yet moving account of his year's imprisonment and more general reflections on Nazi Germany and human nature.
The details and minor anecdotes he provides are memorable--to give one example, many of the prisoners spoke little or no German and were thereby at a disadvantage because their failure to comprehend order barked at them by the authorities were often met with various degrees of violence.
The Truce is the story of Levi's circuitous and lengthy journey (with others) back to Italy after liberation by the Russians which, remarkably went through the Ukraine and Hungary. It reminds me of the uncertainties and perils faced by current Mideast refugees.
An intriguing postscript--Levi may or may not have committed suicide in 1987 when he went over the staircase of his 4th floor apartment where he was born and lived most of his life. Google New Yorker Primo Levi for a more complete review of his works.
Profile Image for Lorri.
556 reviews
September 26, 2016
Primo Levi's short stories were excellent reads, as were his poems. I was surprised to see he had written as many poems as he did.

His science fiction stories were fantastic, IMO, and I found a bit of humor within some of them. As always, his stories leave one to ponder the content, including his science fiction stories.

Whether metaphysical, theological, transcendental, or otherwise, I recommend The Complete Works of Primo Levi.
41 reviews1 follower
September 29, 2017
OK i didn't read the ENTIRE works, but I did read the main novels which was my main aim here. I really enjoyed the Holocaust ones, and the Periodic Table is brilliant.
Profile Image for Kim.
189 reviews5 followers
Want to read
December 20, 2019
One hundred years after the birth of Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor, his work remains as powerful as ever.

Famous for his book If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz) — a searing account of the year he spent in a Nazi death camp — he is also widely admired for his idiosyncratic literary memoir, The Periodic Table, which was named the best science book ever written by The Royal Institution of Great Britain. In 2015, his writing was newly translated and published in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, a three-volume set edited by Ann Goldstein with an introduction by Toni Morrison.
2 reviews
September 15, 2019
This is a brilliant discovery, Primo Levi and his collected works. The anchors of the book include: If This is a Man, The Truce, If Not Now, When?, and the Periodic Table. There is also a vast collection of poems, essays, letters, criticism and other works by Primo Levi.
If This Is A Man was his first and most popular work. It is a touchstone entry in the annals of the Holocaust record, along with Elie Wiesel's Night, Olga Lengyel's Five Chimneys, and Hermann Langbein's definitive People in Auschwitz. If This is a Man is a harrowing yet reflective narrative on Levi's time in Auschwitz. His touch is objective and light, underscoring a flinty resolve to capture the experience for all of posterity. It covers his capture as a two-bit “partisan” , the journey to Auschwitz, and internment in the Lager until liberation by the Soviets. He glosses over nothing: the daily humiliations, wanton murder and destruction, savagery of the SS men, block leaders, and other functionaries. Levi admits early that he was not special and would almost certainly not have survived without the aid of good luck. He gained employment at the IG Farben Works at Buna, an indoor job that provided some respite from backbreaking hard labor and scant clothing that typically meant death within weeks or months of Jews arriving at Auschwitz. He also credits his life to the fortuitous meeting with Lorenzo, a fellow Italian worker who provided an extra ration of bread to Levi every day for six months. It’s hard to overstate how seminal this book is, and for good reason. It’s one of the major works in existence that captures the experience at Auschwitz. It’s accurate, objective and excellently authored, a categorical classic in the genre.
The Truce turns out to be a rollicking tale of his time between liberation in Auschwitz and a circuitous arrival back home to Turin, Italy. It's probably Levi's best work but his is a high standard throughout the collected works. His recall and powers of observation of his fellow travelers are in peak form here; think Chaucer's Canterbury Tales albeit a voyage conducted in the shadow of the Holocaust. That dread followed him home to Turin when Levi wakes from "a dream within a dream", with all devolving into the Lager--it's a dream that may very well have literally followed him to the grave.
If Not Now, When?, is a fictional work that follows in tone the aforementioned works and tells the story of Jewish partisans who manage to resist, survive the War, and contemplate establishing themselves in the new State of Israel. It's a serviceable narrative; the pace is a bit maudlin but with interesting characters and an inspiring storyline. The book is still a welcome reminder of the often-overlooked Jewish resistance throughout the Holocaust and is not out of place here.
The Periodic Table is a sterling piece of work that stands apart from most of Levi's collected works. A career chemist by trade, Levi links chemical elements to significant events in his life, most of them autobiographical and bearing increasing relation to his trials leading up to internment in Auschwitz. Every story isn't linked directly to this experience but there hangs about most of the entries a residue of inexorable melancholy. Like most of Primo's prose, these stories are crisply written in such a way that in lesser works might induce a brisk reading pace but his purposeful and precise diction startle the reader into re-reading lines. In one of the more arresting stories, perhaps the best of them all, "Iron", Primo comments about his friend, the martyred Sandro, and his rugged outdoor ability and reticent manner, "It seemed that, as with climbing, no one had taught him to speak; he spoke the way nobody speaks, saying only the essence of things"; this is story telling of the highest order. Most of these stories are heartbreaking; the aforementioned "Iron" and "Cerium" may compel one to weep. "Phosphorus" is absolutely exhilarating; Giulia, Levi's crush is a whirlwind and the story, in the space of a few pages, has the range and sweep of an epic but like most things in the late 30's/early 40's, is cut short by the Third Reich.
Included are also collected poems, which often speak to dire feelings and reflections. Levi’s verses are even more incisive than his prose (which is saying something), and he seems only to have resorted to poetry when prose simply wouldn't do. Of course, much of this subject matter has to do with the misery, alienation, death, and Destruction at the ends of the earth--the German concentration camps. In "Buna 1" Levi is unquestionably speaking of the endless, gray death of the masses in the gas chambers, millions ground down by unspeakable hostilities and cruelties. "Gray companion, you were a strong man/A woman traveled next to you/Empty comrade who has no more name . . . If we were to meet again/Up in the sweet world under the sun/With what face would we confront each other?" In February 25, 19441, he writes, "I'd like to believe something beyond/Beyond death destroyed you"; the notes state that this might have been a poem to a beloved also from Turin who perished at Auschwitz in Oct '44. The poems are generally suffused with longing, despair, and death even. They can make for difficult, but what ought to be, required reading.
As stated, there are vast amounts of letters, essays, stories, and even books (The Wrench) that Primo Levi left to us, gratefully compiled here in the Completed Works. They are all-important and warrant reading, study, and reflection. Added to that, his works are less written than crafted. Here and there one will read critics that state Primo Levi was not a great writer, on the order of, say, a Hemmingway, Norman Mailer, etc. That opinion is certainly debatable but Levi was a writer with different things to say and I'm not sure that anyone else could have bested him in that regard. Levi documented his experience in the worst man-made destruction that has ever befallen humanity and felt compelled to make a record of it, not only for himself, but for the millions of victims and all of posterity. He captured the merciless prosecutors of this crime at Auschwitz, the conniving, thieving, murderous members of the Third Reich. Somehow he managed to do it almost dispassionately, with the rigor of his scientific mind, the better to take an accurate measure of the scope and scale of this crime against all of humanity in If This Is A Man. In subsequent writings, his narrative ability, intelligence, humility, wit and even humor remained as sharp as ever in documenting the human experience at its best, its worst, and all that is in between. The Collected Works by Primo Levi are a credit to him, and thankfully, remain a gift to us, one of the most gifted minds of his or any generation. Speaking of gifted minds, as an added treat to this singular collection from Primo Levi, we get an introduction from the legendary, dearly parted, Pulitzer Prize winning Toni Morrison. They both are resting in good company.



312 reviews
February 25, 2016
Read portions of Vol II only:

The Periodic Table: 30 Dec 2015 - 31 Jan 2016
The Wrench: 1 - 5 February 2016


from The Periodic Table p.880 "Chromium"
...the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hamper, muffle, blunt every flash of intuition and every spark of intelligence. Besides, the experts know that all secretions are harmful or toxic: in pathological conditions, it's not unusual for paper, a company secretion, to be reabsorbed to an excessive degree, and to put to sleep, paralyze, or even kill the organism that exuded it.`
Profile Image for Vicky.
73 reviews3 followers
July 27, 2016
I read the novel "If Not Now, When? Which included in this complete works. It presented a different view of WWII than I had ever read before. It was about a band of Jewish men and women from Russia and Poland, outcasts in their homelands. This band fought the Germans through sabotage and surprise attacks. They were tough fighters and ultimately survivors.
Profile Image for Geoff Wisner.
Author 6 books2 followers
July 24, 2016
Didn't read it all (because I've read most of Primo Levi in other editions) but I was grateful to read the previously uncollected stories and essays. One of the 20th century's great writers.
Profile Image for Anthony.
80 reviews8 followers
November 4, 2019
This complete works is a real gem, published in a very nice three volume box set which I will no doubt return to in the years to come. For now, I've started with "If This Is a Man" (published in the US as Survival in Auschwitz, much to the annoyance of its original English translator, Stuart J. Woolf). This book gives a vivid account of the year Levi spent as prisoner 174517 in Auschwitz. It is extremely well written, and gives the reader a real sense (to the extent of what is possible without having experienced it) of what it was like to try to survive is this death camp. This edition has some additional updates from Woolf and includes an Appendix by Levi, originally written in 1976 for the school edition, in which he answers questions he received continually from both student and adult readers.
Profile Image for Ioana.
300 reviews11 followers
Read
October 2, 2021
This book is a necessary read in order to grasp the dehumanizing dimension of the Shoah. It cast a direct light on the events, making us witnesses to the immense suffering they entailed. The content of the current public renditions of the same events is so far from the survivors' stories that we should make a point of having any potential writers first read Levi.
37 reviews
March 11, 2020
Consistently thoughtful, thought provoking and well written.
It might seem daunting to read everything published but one person but I enjoyed virtually all of it.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.