The Last Interview: Conversations with Giovanni Tesio - Levi, Primo ; Woolf, Judith
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The Last Interview: Conversations with Giovanni Tesio
Levi, Primo ; Woolf, Judith
Synopsis "The Last Interview: Conversations with Giovanni Tesio"
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 in English 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. Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz owing to his 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.
Nació en el seno de una familia judía asentada en el Piamonte. En 1941 se graduó como químico en la Universidad de Turín, una profesión que compaginaría posteriormente con su actividad literaria. Tras participar en la resistencia del norte de Italia, fue capturado y deportado al campo de concentración de Auschwitz. Después de la liberación del campo, en 1945, y de un azaroso periplo por el este de Europa, Levi regresó a Turín, donde publicó su primer testimonio sobre los campos de exterminio nazis, Si esto es un hombre (1947), libro fundacional de la literatura concentracionaria.
Posteriormente vieron la luz La tregua (1963) y Los hundidos y los salvados (1986), dos títulos imprescindibles que completan la Trilogía de Auschwitz. Entre sus obras destacan también sus cinco volúmenes de cuentos: Historias naturales, Defecto de forma, El sistema periódico, Lilít y otros relatos y Última Navidad de guerra.
