The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography - Hardcover

Angier, Carole

3.66

32 ratings by Goodreads

9780670883332: The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670883336 ISBN 13: 9780670883332

Publisher: Viking, 2002

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Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir and meditation, IF THIS IS A MAN, is a key to understanding the twentieth century. Now, Carole Angier has written the remarkable and revelatory story of this man's life. Levi's books made their modest author into an icon of human dignity and justice for the whole of the Western world. But what kind of man was this intensely private Italian-Jewish chemist from Turin? Did Auschwitz make him a writer at twenty-seven and kill him at sixty-seven, or is the truth morecomplicated than that? Carole Angier's compelling and wide-ranging biography tackles these tough questions to create a profound and moving portrait of an extraordinary man.

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Review:

'Her book isn't only a biography it's about biography - the guilt, frustration, risk and excitement of capturing someone else's life.' Guardian

From the Publisher:

Philip Roth described Primo Levi's most famous work, If This Is a Man, as 'one of the century's truly necessary books.' This remark could also be used to describe the man behind the work: for Levi is, without doubt, one of the twentieth century's truly necessary writers. Here, for the first time, we have a biography that does him justice. Carole Angier's profound, touching and revealing book not only brings to light previously unpublished writing - the first and last things Levi ever wrote - but also reveals, with great sensitivity, his secret personal world: his lifelong battle with depression, and its role in his end; his difficulties with emotion, both before and after Auschwitz; his sustaining friends.

Hilary Spurling writes: ‘The Double Bond has the pace and grip of a thriller. I could hardly put it down from start to finish. Carole Angier explores the dark secrets of Primo Levi's life and work with humane and moving clarity. She uses the unknown and unknowable as key structural elements – like holes in lace – in a biographical design as rich, intricate and mysterious as the nature of the man it mirrors.’

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