Translated by John Shepley
The Marlboro Press, Usa
Conversations with Primo Levi
One felt - and the feeling goes on - that if there is an answer to the riddle of our mortal times, it would have been Primo Levi who possessed it. In the secrets he had brought back from where he had been - that was finally where his seductiveness lay, beyond the clear blue eyes, the childlike candor of his smile, the gentle manner of that frail and yet immensely imposing figure. Beginning in 1982 and at intervals over the next four years Ferdinando Camon travelled to Turin for a series of meetings with Levi: this book is the record of their dialogues, Levi spoke of the war, of anti-Semitism, of the camps, of the German guilt, of the emergence of Israel, and of his own extraordinary life and his extraordinary work; and to what the older writer had to tell him the younger writer paid a richly intuitive heed. The give-and-take of the discussion, its tone, its lucidity, its intelligence, lifts it well above the level and format of the usual journalistic interview with a celebrated author.