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The Last Interview: Conversations with Giovanni Tesio
by Primo Levi - £12.99 Polity Press (2018)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781509519552 | ISBN 10: 1509519556
Translated by Judith Woolf
At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here for the first time.
In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio's tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades. All these things were to play their part in Levi's later vocation as a writer, that trade which he saw as 'a more strenuous version of the business of living'. The story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz due to Levi's sudden death.
In The Last Interview, Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history. These conversations shed new light on Levi's life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.
(Price & availability last checked: August 2018)
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