Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961 - 1987 - Softcover

"One of the most important and gifted writers of our time" Italo Calvino "The qualities of mind and heart that made Primo Levi the essential chronicler of Auschwitz are on display in this invaluable collection. The voice is impossible to forget: ironical, subtle and humane. He talks as he writes, with the quiet precision of a chemist and the moral imagination of someone who has learned everything that suffering can teach." Michael Ignatieff "Primo Levi, who spent two years in Auschwitz, is perhaps the most influential of the writers who survived the Holocaust. His status will be enhanced still further by this collection of 36 interviews...One recognises the voice familiar from his masterpieces, but a picture emerges of Levi also as political polemicist and Jewish atheist. Essential reading for readers of Levi as well as for students of contemporary literature." Sally Cousins, The Sunday Telegraph "An essential addition to the canon ... these interviews enhance our previously limited knowledge, outside Italy, of the mana s public face ... The Voice of Memory, an exceptionally well--edited and well--translated book, has two valuable introductions by the editors and very helpful notes ... I believe that the whole world has benefited from the presence of this man whose labours over 40 years fortified the planeta s fragile immune system with antibodies of understanding and truth."Anthony Rudolf, The Jewish Chronicle a Reading through the 36 interviews with Primo Levi (1919--87) that Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon have collected in The Voice of Memory can be an uncomfortable and bitter experience. There are pages upon pages with grim descriptions of Nazi concentration camps and the "demolition of man" that took place there ... and with Levia s despair at being unable to explain what he experienced. (The interviews are expertly translated from the Italian by Gordon). Still, much in these pages is deeply satisfying, and some interviews are strikingly illuminating.a New York Times Book Review a With this collection of interviews drawn from the course of more than a quarter of a century, Levi can now be recognized not only as a writer of the Holocaust but as a seminal thinker of the 20th century.a Publishers Weekly a This selection from over 250 recorded interviews makes for fascinating reading and confirms, as Robert Gordon says in his useful preface, that "Levi speaks as if writing and writes as if speaking." a Jerusalem Post

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.