Martin Amis and Ian Thomson on the legacy of Primo Levi
The British writers spoke in 2019, the centenary of the birth of the chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor
WARNING: This audio contains discussion of suicide.
One hundred years after the birth of Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor, his work remains as powerful as ever.
Famous for his book If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz) — a searing account of the year he spent in a Nazi death camp — he is also widely admired for his idiosyncratic literary memoir, The Periodic Table, which was named the best science book ever written by The Royal Institution of Great Britain. In 2015, his writing was newly translated and published in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, a three-volume set edited by Ann Goldstein with an introduction by Toni Morrison.
To discuss his life and influence, Writers & Company brought together his biographer Ian Thomson and novelist and essayist Martin Amis, who cites Levi's impact on his own acclaimed fiction about the Holocaust. The full episode originally aired in 2019 and was partially included in the March 3, 2024 about Martin Amis and The Zone of Interest.
The writer's writer
Martin Amis: Primo Levi is an important writer — not just for scholars or general readers of the Holocaust — but for other writers as well. Saul Bellow was a great admirer of Primo Levi.
Bellow always used to say that Levi was exemplary for the fact that all his sentences had the right number of words. There was never one too many or one too few. Levi is a model in that respect. Not a word wasted.
There's no writer from the 20th century in Italy — apart from Italo Calvino perhaps — who has approached that extreme purity and transparency of his writing.- Ian Thomson
Ian Thomson: I absolutely agree. We can touch on chemistry as well. Chemistry is very much a science of measuring and qualitative analysis. From chemistry, Levi derived a kind of personal cult of concision and precision in his own writing, which he saw, in some ways, as a sovereign politeness toward the reader.
He was absolutely a master prose writer in Italian. There's no writer from the 20th century in Italy — apart from Italo Calvino perhaps — who has approached that extreme purity and transparency of his writing.
Understanding evil
Amis: Levi is the visionary of the Holocaust, its presiding spirit and the most perceptive of all writers on this subject. I owe him a great debt. What I and others have found is that you read about the Holocaust and your knowledge increases — but your understanding does not.
Levi is the visionary of the Holocaust, its presiding spirit and the most perceptive of all writers on this subject.- Martis Amis
As I was settling down to attempt my second novel about the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest — which was Social Realist and not mythopoetic like my 1991 Holocaust novel Time's Arrow — I was discouraged by the fact that I got nowhere in understanding it.
There's a marvellous written interview that's included in the appendix of Levi's The Truce where he says not only can we not understand the Holocaust, but we should not understand and we must not understand it.
To understand something is to somehow accept it. No one can understand the Nazi leaders and Hitler himself, who is famously opaque. Many a thinker and historian has said the more they read about Hitler, they find it more and more difficult to explain. Levi says we should be relieved that we can't understand it, because these people and their actions are anti-human.
I was amazed to read this and felt an instant liberation, where a weight was lifted from me.
Thomson: Levi proclaimed himself a non-believer but he was culturally Jewish. He was, from an early age, interested in Old Testament stories of survival and deliverance.
The morality of If This Is a Man, although secular, contains within itself a whole kind of moral history of Jewish condemnation of inhumanity. I think that it's a mistake to see Levi as purely a secular writer and somehow to claim him for the secular cause. He's much more complicated than that.
A journey of discovery
Amis: Levi's moral stance — his moral penetration — sets him apart as a writer. The Drowned and The Saved is perhaps philosophically at the centre of his thoughts about Auschwitz and moments of reprieve. There's this marvellous resiliency as he concentrates on those happier days spent at Auschwitz.
There are kinds of shades and subtleties to sort out, but you wouldn't call it the force of condemnation... it's a journey of discovery. He didn't stop to write about the Holocaust with a great fuel tank of indignation. It was rather tentative and exploratory.
Thomson: I think a lot of readers have remarked, not so much with his final book The Drowned and The Saved but with his first book If This Is a Man, that it has flashes of quiet humour. Its affirmation of human dignity instills a kind of almost paradoxical joy in the reader.
Levi doesn't ever dwell on the mechanics of mass murder, but on what remained of the human face in the camp.- Ian Thomson
Levi doesn't ever dwell on the mechanics of mass murder, but on what remained of the human face in the camp. He obviously didn't describe the gas chambers or the assembly line murder of people because he didn't see any of it. He limited himself, like a true scientist, to what he saw and heard. To stray beyond this would have been morally indefensible. He would have started to make things up.
Martin Amis and Ian Thomson's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
If you are thinking of suicide or know someone who is, here are ways you can get help:
- Canada Suicide Prevention Service: 1-833-456-4566 (Phone) | 45645 (Text) | crisisservicescanada.ca (Chat)
- In Quebec (French): Association québécoise de prévention du suicide: 1-866-APPELLE (1-866-277-3553)
- Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868 (Phone), Live Chat counselling at www.kidshelpphone.ca
- Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention: Find a crisis centre
If you feel your mental health or the mental health of a loved one is at risk of an immediate crisis, call 911.
