Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
pages 9-15 | 10187 words
Travelling in the Classic Style
Thomas Laqueur
- Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics by Robert Gordon
Oxford, 316 pp, £45.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 19 815963 3
- Primo Levi by Ian Thomson
Hutchinson, 624 pp, £25.00, March 2002, ISBN 0 09 178531 6
- The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography by Carole Angier
Viking, 898 pp, £25.00, April 2002, ISBN 0 670 88333 6
Primo Levi is among the most read and most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous age. He created more powerful images, more mind-sustaining turns of phrase through which to think about these matters than any other writer. The ‘drowned and the saved’, for example: that appallingly stark, Darwinian division between those who managed to secure a few extra grams of food for themselves, or respite from labour, or shelter from the cold, or friendship, and those who ended ‘on the bottom’, the ‘Muselmänner’, whom a pitiless system had reduced to the merely biological, the already dead whom everyone shunned. Or ‘the chemistry examination’, in which the starving prisoner, wondering what it would be like to be in the mind of his well-fed examiner, Dr Pannwitz, looks at him ‘as if across an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds. If he could explain that look he would have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.’
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002
From Diego Gambetta
Although I am not one of those who believe that Primo Levi could not have committed suicide, I would suggest that it isn't very probable. We know that just before leaving his apartment he instructed the nurse to mind the telephone, saying that he was going out to look for the concierge. If he only decided to hurl himself down the stairwell after he'd left the apartment, then he must have made that decision in a matter of seconds. This doesn't seem entirely plausible. However, contrary to what Thomas Laqueur writes (LRB, 5 September), we do have evidence that he was suffering from dizziness. On the Thursday before his death (which happened on a Saturday) he called Dr Giorgio Luzzati and told him he felt tired and was having dizzy spells. It is possible that he leaned forward into the stairwell looking for the concierge, who had been delivering the mail to his apartment a few minutes before; if while doing so he'd had another dizzy spell the weight of the upper half of his body would have been enough to drag him over the banister.
Diego Gambetta
All Souls College, Oxford
From Ian Thomson
In his review of my biography of Primo Levi, Thomas Laqueur mentions Levi's enthusiasm for Azio Corghi's Modernist opera based on Rabelais's Gargantua. Does anyone know of this opera's existence? Is a recording available? Is the composer, Azio Corghi, still alive?
Ian Thomson
Tallinn
Vol. 24 No. 19 · 3 October 2002
From Margaret Kearton
I can set Thomas Laqueur's mind at rest about the residential practices of the postwar Italian middle classes (LRB, 5 September). My husband comes from the Modena bourgeoisie (his father and grandfather were lawyers) and his parents moved in with his father's family following their marriage in 1952. It seems to have been largely a matter of course at the time, and things were very much the same in the countryside, as both landowners' and sharecroppers' sons brought their wives to live under the family roof. Things haven't been so quick to change: young marrieds no longer live in the same flat as their parents, but they are unlikely to live very far away. I seem to recall Paul Ginsborg, in Italy and Its Discontents, stating that 90 per cent of Italian men live within 50 km of their mothers. I suspect that the figure is little different for women and their fathers, since people generally marry, and live, close to their roots. The lack of university grants and the 'open door' policy on university admissions has certainly played a part in this – as people don't necessarily shift around the country on leaving school – but it's also simply a social preference.
Margaret Kearton
Ospitale nel Frignano, Italy
From Scott Lahti
Ian Thomson (Letters, 19 September) asks about the Italian composer Azio Corghi's opera Gargantua. The opera premiered in Turin in 1984 at the Teatro Regio; sheet music is offered for rent by MusiGramma.com; no recording of it appears to be available via music search engines, though a CD of the 1993 opera Divara – Wasser und Blut, whose libretto Corghi wrote with José Saramago, is currently on the Marco Polo label. Corghi himself (1937-) is very much alive, having appeared here in the United States in June at a music festival at the University of Cincinnati.
Scott Lahti
Marquette, Michigan
