Voice of Memory

Over the course of more than twenty-five years, Primo Levi gave more than two hundred newspaper, journal, radio and television interviews speaking with such varied authors as Philip Roth and Germaine Greer. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon have selected and translated thirty-six of the most important of these interviews for The Voice of Memory.

We recognize the voice familiar to us from Levi's masterpieces, from The Periodic Table to The Drowned and the Saved. But we also see a fuller, more varied and more complex picture of the writer famously shrouded in his past. There is Levi the Holocaust witness; Levi the writer; Levi the intellectual; Levi the political polemicist; and Levi the atheist and Jew, holding onto his Jewish culture while rejecting the symbols of a faith he could not share.

Levi emerges in a rich, contradictory and essentially human light. He was a classic figure out of place. As he put it, 'I am an amphibian, a centaur. I live with this paranoiac split'. Levi's status as perhaps the most important of the survivor-writers of the Holocaust is enhanced still further by his many voices speaking in this remarkable book.

This volume will be of considerable interest to all readers of Primo Levi's work, as well as to students and scholars of contemporary literature.