The Double Bond (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Carole Angier
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1919-1987
- Setting: Turin, Italy, and Auschwitz, Poland
- Principal Characters: Primo Levi, Anna Maria Levi, Lucia Morpurgo Levi, Rina Luzzati Levi, Cesare Levi
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Suffering, Journalism or journalists, Prisoners, Suicide, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Europe or Europeans, Literature, World War II, Poetry or poets, Jews or Jewish life, Depression, mental, Captivity, Nazism or Nazis, Italy or Italians, Holocaust, Jewish, Poland or Polish people, Fascism, Concentration camps
- Locales: Poland, Turin, Italy, Auschwitz-Berkenau
Primo Levi would seem a curious subject for a biography, considering how excessively reticent, almost secretive, he was about his personal life, but as Carole Angier notes in her preface, for her as a writer, reserve intrigues—and the extreme reserve exhibited by her subject intrigued her extremely. In spite of her intrigue, however, Angier had to overcome not only Levi’s reticence but also his family’s high wall of reserve and privacy—made even higher, she discovered, by the traditional diffidence of Turinese—and the tragedy of his death by suicide. As biographer, therefore,...
[The entire page is 2054 words long]
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