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...Primo Levi...
Well, now you know, because these were among the more than 350,000 thoughts floating around inside the head of the late Primo Levi, and a good number of them have been crystallized in this engaging posthumous collection of essays. For most of his life Levi was known mainly for having written one of the very best Holocaust memoirs, a thoughtful and kindhearted account titled Survival in Auschwitz. At the end of his life, in 1987, Levi was in the headlines again, for having leaped down the stairwell of the apartment house where he had lived since birth. Whether this...
...Levi was a professional chemist, manager of a paint factory in Turin until he retired at 58 to write, and so he writes from a scientific perspective and with a scientist's precision. But he was also a humanist, a lover of poetry, and these brief essays demonstrate the remarkable range of his interests, from children's games to the genius of Rabelais to the dissatisfactions of playing chess against a computer to the question of why butterflies are considered beautiful. And his mind is agile. When he discovers that the framework of a crinoline gown in the Kremlin museum...
Some people mistrust collections of essays on the ground that they are often fragmentary and monotonous, but it is precisely the diversity of Levi's pensees (artfully translated by Raymond Rosenthal) that makes them so entertaining. That and the basic quality of Levi's mind, skeptical but sympathetic, a bit melancholy but witty; one feels that he is a friend. About all those beetles, Levi speculates that they may be the creatures destined to take over the postnuclear world. "Many millions of years will have to pass," he writes, "before a beetle particularly loved by God . . . will find written...
...Russia House mixes spying and glasnost, commanding suspense and a treatise on our times. -- Primo Levi's essays distill a mind of rare quality...