History will remember Jewish-Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (1919–1986) as a seminal chronicler of the Holocaust—one of the first and certainly one of the most memorable. But in undertaking his biography, Angier (Jean Rhys: Life and Work) faced a host of obstacles: the tight-knit, impenetrable community of Turin, Levi's native city; a closemouthed family; inaccessible papers. There was also the hurdle of Levi's own fictionalized alter ego—always true to character, but rarely an exact match with the facts. Angier deftly fills the lacunae with recollections and anecdotes drawn from her research. Her skillful narrative illuminates not only the painful, dramatic passages of her subject's life—his work in the partisan resistance, his extraordinary survival in Auschwitz—but also the decades after the war that Levi spent as a chemical specialist in varnishes and resins, quietly issuing works of literary genius (If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved) every now and then. Always sensitive to the historical context of her subject, Angier provides a macroscopic view of the war from the perspective of Italian Jewry. But she also explicates some of the more difficult, ambiguous aspects of Levi's temperament: his fear of women, his tendency to see chemistry as a metaphor for life, the fierce determination to bear witness that underlay his gentle nature, and the inner torment that eventually drove him to suicide. Anyone moved by Levi's accounts of heroism and atrocity will learn much from this nuanced biography. (May)
