The life in Levi's writing

His uncle Oreste started Primo Levi climbing at about the age of eight. In search of alpine strawberries, they roamed the hills which cradle Turin; to make the going easier, his uncle would say, as Virgil says to Dante, "walk in my footsteps". As puberty loomed and Levi came in for his ration of bullying because he was puny, "a strange tiny animal" as he remembered he seemed to his classmates, and because he was Jewish (they told him circumcision was a form of castration), the mountains became for him both a place of refuge and a vast gymnasium in which he acquired the quiet power of endurance, a modest wiriness.

It was from their snows that he was taken by the fascist militia, shortly before Christmas 1943, first to the plains of Emilia-Romagna, to the detention-camp at Fossoli amid the orchards of Modena, and thence to Auschwitz, that low point where the most prominent verticals to which he might lift up his eyes were chimneys.

It seems to me superfluous to tell what happened to Levi there, as he did this himself in his piercing book, Se questo ë un uomo. The title in English is If This is a Man, but would be better rendered Whether This is a Man, or even Would You Call This a Man? for the phrase comes from one of his poems in which he asks his readers to "consider whether this is a man" and then describes himself as he was then, there.

He survived, but in the 40 years of writing which followed persisted in asking what he had survived as. This was not a merely personal question about the damage done to him and, even more, by him; he wrote with pained honesty about the shifts to which he was put to eke out those sparse days - the petty thefts, the bamboozling of less adept prisoners, all manner of connivance to ensure that he should be, as far as possible, first in any line that might sustain his life. He was ashamed of himself, but also, as he said in 1955, ashamed to belong "to the same species that had built Auschwitz". He had an unusually keen sense of what Marx called "species-being", of that human solidarity which the Bible expresses by saying that we are all descended from common parents. So the question Se questo asks the reader about Levi is also one the book asks each reader: what is left of your humanity?

While he waited for his writing to be recognised (it took a dozen years and a second, revised edition), he married and brought up two children in the apartment where he was born, his mother's rooms over which she continued to rule. He also returned to his second mother, matter itself, and to his work as a chemist; his less successful projects included an attempt to discover a tooth-dye so fashionable ladies could match their smiles to their other accessories and a scheme for synthesizing alloxan - essential to lip-stick - from python-droppings. Some of the older paintwork you now see in Italian hotels, and some of the insulated wiring that unnerves you in their showers, will be the indirect result of Levi's ingenuity and care.

His appetite came back. In the camp, he had eaten, among other things, cotton-wool and soup that "might contain a sparrow's wings, prune stones, salami rind, even bits of La Stampa newsprint"; now he could get the tripe he loved and not only frogs' legs but their heads too.

Eventually he won so many awards for his books, a sensible person acquainted with the vagaries of literary-prize infighting might wonder whether he can have been that good a writer. He was. The Truce, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, along with a couple of handfuls of short stories, will die only with the language in which they are written. He became, alas, a celebrity, made public statements, gave interviews, undertook a lecture-tour of the US, where he admired the skyscrapers of Manhattan as "like Dolomites of light"; he was personally met at a reception in Broadcasting House by Sue MacGregor when he appeared on Woman's Hour.

He fell to his death down the stairwell of his birthplace on 11 April 1987 while deep in one of the depressions from which he had long regularly suffered. The Corso Re Umberto on which he lived runs parallel to the train-lines and the river Po; he could not see his mountains from his window.

These two biographies are more interested in Levi's life than in his writing, let alone the life of his writing. That is the main thing wrong with both of them. Carole Angier is actually more interested in her own intuitions about Levi than in her victim; in one six-page chapter there are 103 references to herself. She calls him "Primo" though she never met him; she understands him so well she can speak for him with confidence: "I don't know if Primo said anything to Paolo; but I'm sure he did", "So he always said, and I am sure he meant it."

Indeed, she fears we might mistake her for him and has to point out "this is me now, not Primo". She need not have feared. The atrocious shoddiness of her writing makes it easy to tell the difference, as in her addiction to "almost" - " almost certainly mostly Sephardic", "his almost superhuman detachment, which could seem almost inhuman as well", "still not finally true, but almost". "It is essential - this is Levi now, not me - to mistrust the almost-the-same, the virtually identical, the approximate".