Primo Levi

[Nico87]

So, anyone read anything by him? I'm currently reading If This Is a Man/The Truce, and I'm absolutely loving it. I'm a huge warbuff when it comes to books and movies, and a large part of my bookshelf is dedicated to WW1 and WW2 books, but the holocaust has never really appealed to me through books. I've watched Schindler's List and some other movies about the Holocaust, but I've never really thought about reading about it, because it doesn't connect with WW2 for me (obviously it does, but when I think of Holocause, I don't really think of the World War 2 itself with the battles, etc.)

So I'm really wondering if anyone has read If This Is a Man/The Truce or The Periodic Table, and what you thought of these books. If some of you don't recognize the title If This Is a Man/The Truce, it might just be because they were released as Survival in Auschwitz/The Reawakening.

I for one love the book, as I already stated above. I think he makes the book alive with his descriptions of things and places, and my head was full of thoughts and imaginations after reading about 100 pages. I can't wait to read more tonight.

Another question I have iiiiiis, what do I read after I'm done with If This Is a Man/The Truce? I'm thinking of either reading Dead Souls by Gogol, or Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn. I might also go Evelyn Waugh with the Sword of Honor Trilogy, Catch-22 by Heller, or even The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. Lolita by Nabokov, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus is also considered, although I'm leaning towards either Sword of Honor Trilogy, Dead Souls, Cancer Ward, or The Good Soldier Švejk.

As you might understand from that list, I have no clue what to read next! :sick:

[JBI]

I've heard of him - and meant to read him, but haven't gotten around to it yet. He apparently is a relatively good poet, as well as novelist.

[bazarov]

Did heard, did not read.
Next - Dead Souls, Lolita or The Good Soldier Švejk.

[Pecksie]

I read both, in Italian, which maybe wasn't such a good idea because I'm more used to reading in English or Spanish :(

I enjoyed Natalia Ginzburg's essays, which also deal with being a Jew in a fascist country during WWII (though not with the camps), much better. I think she's a more accessible writer than Levi, whom I had to plod through (but maybe if I read it now it would be different).

[pussnboots]

Several months ago I read Survival In Auschwitz and I liked it very much

[Bitterfly]

I love Primo Levi, have read both The Truce, If it's a man, The periodic table and a few of his poems. That's all, I think, not because I don't want to read his other books but because they're not easy to find. You should go on with his only novel, If not Now, When? which is about Jewish partisans and their trek through Poland and Eastern Europe down to Italy and Israel. It's sublime.

Do read Soljenitzyn. Cancer Ward is great, even though I think I preferred The First Circle (or A day in the life of Ivan Denissovitch).

Like you, I'm also fascinated with books which evoke both world wars, and here are a few to go on:
_ English poets of WW1 (anthologies are easy to find)
_ Regeneration by Pat Barker, which fictionalises the encounter between Sassoon, Owen and a psychiatrist. A beautiful book.
_ Remarque's novels, to get the other point of view. I love, love, love everything I've read of him: All is Quiet on the Western Front, obviously, Arch of Triumph, The Road Back...

_ Hans Fallada, another German author, Alone in Berlin.
_ Irène Némirovsky, French Jewish writer who died in the camps: a very original point of view on collaborators in France (she was a bit of an anti-semite).
_ Robert Anthelme, on the camps: The Human Species.
_ Imre Kertész, of course (Nobel prize 2002)! Fatelessness or Kaddish for an unborn child.
_ Jorge Semprun - but I don't remember which one!
And so many others...

Anyway, have fun reading!:thumbs_up

[Nico87]

I love Primo Levi, have read both The Truce, If it's a man, The periodic table and a few of his poems. That's all, I think, not because I don't want to read his other books but because they're not easy to find. You should go on with his only novel, If not Now, When? which is about Jewish partisans and their trek through Poland and Eastern Europe down to Italy and Israel. It's sublime.

Do read Soljenitzyn. Cancer Ward is great, even though I think I preferred The First Circle (or A day in the life of Ivan Denissovitch).

Like you, I'm also fascinated with books which evoke both world wars, and here are a few to go on:
_ English poets of WW1 (anthologies are easy to find)
_ Regeneration by Pat Barker, which fictionalises the encounter between Sassoon, Owen and a psychiatrist. A beautiful book.
_ Remarque's novels, to get the other point of view. I love, love, love everything I've read of him: All is Quiet on the Western Front, obviously, Arch of Triumph, The Road Back...

_ Hans Fallada, another German author, Alone in Berlin.
_ Irène Némirovsky, French Jewish writer who died in the camps: a very original point of view on collaborators in France (she was a bit of an anti-semite).
_ Robert Anthelme, on the camps: The Human Species.
_ Imre Kertész, of course (Nobel prize 2002)! Fatelessness or Kaddish for an unborn child.
_ Jorge Semprun - but I don't remember which one!
And so many others...

Anyway, have fun reading!:thumbs_up

Thanks! I'll try to get my hands on If not Now, When.

Finally a fellow Barker-enthusiast. I absolutely LOVED The Regeneration trilogy, and I've watched the movie up to about 20 times. That scene with whats-his-name and Owen out in the woods, where the guy has slaughtered animals and sits there naked and they both start crying, is one of my absolutely favourite scenes.

I love reading about camps, wether it being about the gulags or the Holocaust, having read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Gulag Archipelago (unabridged), and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

I've read every WW1 poem by Owens and Sassoon, and I've read Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, and The Middle Part of Fortune by Frederic Manning. All outstanding books.

If you haven't read anything of Frank Richards, I strongly recommend Old Soldier Sahib and Old Soldiers Never Die. But please, please, please don't go to the grave without having read Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, and Britain's Last Tommies by Richard van Emden, probably the best WW1 author Britain has ever seen. In fact, read all his books, they come extremely recommended.

All told, my favourite World War book must be Quartered Safe Out Here. It's amazing in every little aspect. It made me chuckle, it made me think, and damnit, it nearly made me cry aswell.

[Bitterfly]

I love reading about camps, wether it being about the gulags or the Holocaust, having read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Gulag Archipelago (unabridged), and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

Oh god, I've been trying to find Kolyma Tales for donkey's years!!! Is it really good? And did you finish the Gulag Archipelago? I confess I didn't read it through to the end.

I don't know most of the authors you suggested afterwards (was it Frazer who wrote the very funny Flashman series, by the way?) so I'll be sure to look them up whenever I can! Thanks!

By the way, have you ever wondered why those periods of history fascinate you? I've pondered the question, and haven't found an answer, really.

[Bitterfly]

PS: another good book about WW2 is the recent Les Bienveillantes by an American author, Jonathan Little (he wrote it in French though). Very interesting, very compelling. He seems to take quite a macabre interest in massacres though.

[Nico87]

Oh god, I've been trying to find Kolyma Tales for donkey's years!!! Is it really good? And did you finish the Gulag Archipelago? I confess I didn't read it through to the end.

I don't know most of the authors you suggested afterwards (was it Frazer who wrote the very funny Flashman series, by the way?) so I'll be sure to look them up whenever I can! Thanks!

By the way, have you ever wondered why those periods of history fascinate you? I've pondered the question, and haven't found an answer, really.

I really liked Kolyma Tales, and I did finish The Gulag Archipelago. I read the trilogy first, then Kolyma Tales, and then One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I don't know why, but reading them in that order really worked for me, although I had already read Ivan Denisovich before The Gulag Archipelago.

It was indeed Frazer who wrote the Flashman series. It's safe to say that I loved them aswell.

Really, I have no idea why I'm particularly interested in the two World Wars. It all begun after I watched Saving Private Ryan back in '99, so I started kinda early (I'm 21 now). After watching it I decided to watch all the "must-see" war movies, and the interest just grew on from there untill I started reading books about WW1 and WW2 three or four years ago, starting with fact-books such as Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Anthony Beevor. I then started reading memoirs and recollections and the like, and here I am. It was actually books about war that made me start reading litterature in general.

I think I'm kind of attracted to all the tragedy. I know that sounds absolutely weird, but it's hard to explain. I really like reading about how it was for the soldiers in the trenches in knee-deep mud, over in Passchendaele, or how it was going over the top that 1st of July 1916 at Somme, or how it was for a German private being so far away from home, fighting against hunger and the cold, and on top of that the Russians, in Stalingrad, and elsewhere. And how it was for an American G.I. to fight over here in Europe, and how it felt like to be in the first wave landing on Tarawa, against literally a wall of fire from the Japanese guns, and of course, on D-Day on Normandie. Not to mention being a completely innocent person ending up in Hell on Earth in a concentration camp, or being a officer writing a small letter to a comrade on the front which contains a few negative words about Stalin, and ending up spending about 11 years in Gulag (Solzhenitsyn).
I obviously like reading stuff from the Axis side aswell, although books are severely lacking (I've only read Storm Of Steel by Ernst Jünger, and Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier).

It's kind of a mentality thing for me, how they felt, what it was like, and so on.

I also very much like reading about young Norwegians (I'm Norwegian myself) who decided to volunteer for the SS Wiking Division, who was actually one of the last divisions in Berlin in the end of the war (Hitler refers to the SS Wiking Division when he says he is convinced that (Felix) Steiner's men will save them, in the movie Der Untergang). It's interesting to read about their point of views, to learn why they volunteered, and so on, specially since most of them were my age (18-25). After all, they were promised so much (not gonna go into details here as I will most likely bore you all with it), and they got so very little in return.

Argh, sorry for the long post.

[Bitterfly]

Nope, not boring at all! There was something like that Wiking Division in France, by the way - the division Charlemagne. I can't say they really fascinate me, even if Irène Némirovsky managed to waken my interest in collaborationists, in their reasons for going along with Pétain and the nazis.

[noema]

Hey Nico87, :)I have read about Primo Levi a lot, especially in connection with Jean Amery (both Amery and Levi committed suicide). I got hold of this book called This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Recurrent references to this book drew me to it as much as its title! Like the book by Levi you read, this one deals with Aushwitz and WW2 and survival. So you can give it a reading.
From your possible reading list I can see you're planning to read a lot of stuff which could be related to death and its representaion. I welcome you to share your thoughts or any new perception on my thread:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=39231

Hey Bitterfly, :)you seem to have read a lot of Levi. Could you tell me if there's anything available on the internet? Do you know any link? I would really love to read Levi. Can't find a book by him at the library though!:(:sick:

[Bitterfly]

Hmm, no, his works aren't in the public domain yet so there aren't any books of his to read on the net. By the way, maybe they're more popular in Europe than in the US, which would explain why you can't find any? I googled him, and there seem to be more sites about him in French (and certainly in Italian) than in English.

[Nico87]

Hi, noema! I will check out that book you mentioned. Thanks alot for the recommandation! I will probably post in your thread in a few days. I'm so busy with work and such at the moment.

Bitterfly - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140186956/ref=s9sdps_c4_14_at1-rfc_g1-frt_g1-3237_g1_si1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=0317X6NJMRVCXQWZANER&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=454435901&pf_rd_i=507846 Go wild! ;)