Primo Levi, A Writer Belonging To The Human Race And Its Culture
Primo Levi was born in Turin in Italy in 1919 to a non-religious Jewish family with Spanish roots. Pursuing an education in chemistry, he flouted Mussolini's racial laws of 1938, which prohibited Jews from higher education. Levi received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Turin in 1941. He eventually landed a position in a pharmaceutical laboratory where he worked until 1943, when the Germans invaded Northern Italy.
One of the last pictures of the Torinise writer
His life and work (as a chemist and as a writer) indissolubly intertwisted
Leaving his job, the young chemist traded his glassware for a pistol, joining a band of partisans devoted to fighting German troops and Italian fascists. After being betrayed by one of his own group, Levi was handed over to the Germans and deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He spent 10 months in that place, where he worked in a synthetic rubber factory in the Monowitz labor section of the camp. Falling ill to scarlet fever, he was left behind when the Germans evacuated the Lager in anticipation of advancing Russian forces. In January 1945 Levi was liberated by the Red Guard. Although freed in January he reached Turin only in October, almost unrecognizable because of malnutrition edema bloating his face. On his way back train journey he is supposed to start his writing career by narrating orally the concentration camp stories. In fact, spurred by Lucia Morpurgo, he met at a Jewish New Year party in 1946 and married in 1947, when the Piedmontese chemist published If This Is A Man (in Italian Se questo è un uomo), his first account of his life in the concentration camp.
Original first edition cover
You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud, Who does not know peace, Who fights for a scrap of bread, Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman Without hair and without name, With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about: I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children. Or may your house fall apart, May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you.
This is the introducing powerful poem which with the original “If” construction invites the readers to meditate in order to carve in their own hearts that hi-story to be told to their children so that no one (from father to his own son and daughter) must forget because it was/is not possible for anyone to retain one’s own humanity in any kind of past, present (when he wrote it there was still the Soviet gulag the writer himself knew well) and future camp.
In 1959 this book was translated into English by Stuart Woolf in close collaboration with the Italian writer; a German translation by Heinz Reidt, under the supervision of Levi himself, was published in 1961 with the title Ist das ein Mensch?
At the same time he shared his work as a chemist and his passion for writing which was not at all a sheer literary hobby but a sort of therapeutic medium in order to try to understand better and better his life experience in a Lager, indelibly carved both under his skin and on it
The second very important book written by the Piedmontese author was The Truce (in Italian La Tregua), appeared in 1963 and depicting the writer’s return journey after his segregation in Auschwitz camp. This epic homeward travel lasts eight months, from February to October, across eastern Europe, through extemporary train stops and mis/adventurous wanderings and concludes at 75 Corso Re Umberto, where Primo Levi had lived in Turin before his deportation.
First edition front cover
This book won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award and put the Italian Jewish artist among the front rank of Italian writers. Moreover, in 1997 this work was adapted into an screenplay by the poet Tonino Guerra for a film, of international production (Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland), directed by Francesco Rosi.
Italian and English film posters
In 1963 the chemist-artist began to suffer from depression crisis, but this did not keep him from working as a chemist and as a writer. In fact, after some interesting writings, in 1975 he published The Periodic Table (English translation of the Italian title Il Sistema Periodico), a collection of short pieces, mostly episodes from his life related to one of the chemical elements. In 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever written.
In 1977 he retired from his position as manager of a chemical factory in Turin, devoting himself exclusively to writing until his controversial death on April 11, 1987, in the apartment building where he was born and eventually took up residence. Falling to his death from the railing of the third-floor stairwell, the question of whether Levi committed suicide or was the victim of a tragic accident is still open to debate. In his last literarily original greeting to this great man, Elie Wiesel said: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”.
Like the most of his works La chiave a stella, written in 1978 and translated into English with the title The Wrench, is also hard to define and classify in a particular literary genre. Some reviewers categorized it as a novel, whose narrator told stories about work and workers. This book also received an important Italian literary prize, Premio Strega in 1979.
His only literary recognizable novel was produced in 1984, If not now, when?, which traces the vicissitudes of some Jewish partisans who, during World War II, sought to survive keeping on fighting against the Germans and finally managing to reach Palestine via Italy. This novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio.
His last meaningful work is The Drowned and the Saved (in Italian I sommersi e i salvati, appeared in 1986) where he reflected upon the reasons leading some Jewish behaving as kapos and the reasons why some prisoners survived while others died. The last question threw him into a great grief: he has always felt “guilty” to be alive while the best men perished. As for the first question he eventually suspended judgement because it is difficult, even more it is impossible to judge people obliged by animal-human nature (that is the instinct of self-preservation) to survive. In the second chapter the author defined this condition “the grey zone”.
In 2001 Tim Black Nelson shot The Grey Zone based upon this theme with an international cast such as Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, Steve Bushemi and David Arquette.
The film poster with the four international actors
It deals with a rebellion of the 12th Sonderkommando at Auschwitz II-Birkenau: the Jewish prisoners were forced by the Nazis to assist in escorting new arrivals to the gas chambers, processing their corpses and cremating their remains. In this de-humanizing and de-identifying place “it is so easy to forget who we were before ... who we’ll never be again”.
Umberto Eco and the World as a Semiotic Enigma
An eloquent picture of Eco gazing farther and further
Umberto Eco (born in 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, tout court a true versatile artist and intellectual. In fact He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of the Republic of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He is best known for his groundbreaking novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written other novels and academic texts, children's books and many essays about several subjects.
A little surprising biography
His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin word meaning “a gift from the heavens”), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.
Eco received a Salesian education and he has made references to this order and its founder in his writings. He entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature. Eco's thesis was on the topic of Thomas Aquinas and this earned him a BA in philosophy in 1954. In that period he abandoned the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith: “When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything”. Then he worked as a cultural editor for RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the state broadcasting station; he also became a lecturer at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had met at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writer career. In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has had a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.
Selected narrative works
Eco employed his education as a medievalist in his first novel The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th century monastery, where Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is to host an important religious debate.
First Italian edition
The novel contains many direct or indirect metatextual references to other sources, requiring the detective work of the reader to 'solve', a sort of detection within the detection; anyway, all his works keep several layers of reading and interpretation. In fact, already in 1962 in Opera aperta (in English “The Open Work”) Eco declared that literary texts are fields of meaning rather than strings of meaning, so they have to be read/understood/interpreted as open, that’s to say internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. A literary writing which reduces both a more potential artistic creation and a more potential understanding of the readers to a single, unequivocal layer of a closed text, remains the least interesting and the least pleasant. On the contrary, the literary text which is more active between mind and society and life (open text) is the most enthralling.
The title is unexplained in the book. As a symbol, the rose is ubiquitous enough to not confer any single meaning. There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the blind monk and librarian Jorge of Burgos; in fact Borges, like Burgos, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books and also went blind in later life. Moreover the main character William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a monk and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Several passages describing him are strongly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's description of Sherlock Holmes. The underlying mystery of the murder is borrowed from the Arabian Nights. The Name of the Rose was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Christian Slater and Ron Perlman, employing the detection plot but not the philosophical and historical themes from the novel.
The original film poster portraying the International cast
In Foucault's Pendulum, appeared in 1988, three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Templars. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this fictitious plan, but their amusement turns dangerous when others learn of “The Plan” and believe that the three men have really discovered the secret to regain the lost treasure of the Templars.
In 1994 Eco wrote his third novel The Island of the Day Before. The book, set in the seventeenth century, is about a man marooned on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing of his life and the adventures that brought him to be marooned.
Baudolino was published in 2000. The protagonist of this novel is a knight who saves the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination, through his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags of his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian and the reader unsure of just how much of his story was a lie.
First Italian edition
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past.
The Prague Cemetery, Eco's last novel, was published in 2010. It is the story of a secret agent who "weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the European Continent". The book is a narrative of the rise of Modern-day antisemitism, by way of the Dreyfus Affair, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other important 19th century events which gave rise to hatred and hostility towards the Jewish people.
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed”.
Work by Avellis Giuseppe and Loconsole Gianmarco from Liceo Scientifico “Galileo Galilei” – Bitonto - ITALY
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