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“... describe a descent into a space between life and death, where moral judgment becomes impossible. Primo Levi called it the ‘grey zone’. In January, the IDF’s chief psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Lucian Tatsa-Laur, claimed that an Israeli hostage held by Hamas would be ‘stripped of all his humanity and all of his being … you are starved, and ...”

“... actual quotation and direct allusion in modern texts in themselves very different from each other. Primo Levi prints a phrase from the poem as an epigraph; in one of his fables, Borges uses the poem as an instance of primary importance to a fictitious, quintessentially modern writer; a stanza in a recent volume by Carol Ann Duffy makes good use of an ...”

“... as one of the Hall brothers says. The Restraint of Beasts was apparently inspired by Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, and asks to be read as an analogical extension of Levi’s description of the Lager as a gigantic social experiment: Thousands of individuals differing in ...”

“... had written nearly a hundred years earlier, but had left in a drawer, was published. Its title was Primo maggio: a novel about socialism. It was well known that in his last years, De Amicis had preached what was generally held to be a sentimental doctrine of social commiseration and inter-class harmony. The all but unanimous reaction of critics – and of the ...”

“... seriously. So there is no lack of places where reviewers can write. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi’s last book, was discussed at some length in ten or twelve different papers. Levi may be a special case – there aren’t many translated writers who command that degree of attention – but the regard in ...”

“... on a charger, overlooking from a promontory’. Thus, too, the ‘humane, temperate, restrained’ Primo Levi – not, Rose notes, that even this humaneness could save him from feeling ‘irrevocably contaminated’ by what he had witnessed.Her most illuminating move is to compare Spielberg’s movie with the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Kazuo ...”

“... discovery, how to enlarge, how to amplify, how to be free.’ He values the moral engagement of Primo Levi over the playfulness of Calvino, but in The Counterlife he seems to split the difference. There’s irony in a formula from the book like ‘there really is no eluding one’s fate’ but it’s necessarily of a very flat kind, with fate’s ...”

“... he is, or is not, an agnostic. It was only in 1991 that Górecki finally brought himself to read Primo Levi’s testimony from Auschwitz; and because there was no Polish translation of it, he had had to read it in the language he had learnt as a schoolboy and Untermensch in his native Silesia. (Even in Germany, nearly half a century after the events ...”

“... signed as shower rooms.Example: Auschwitz, ‘ultimate drainage point of the German universe’ (Primo Levi), where the belongings collected at the selection ramp were taken in trucks to be sorted in the warehouses of Kanada – the land of plenty – and, when more space was needed, Kanada II. Two Kanadas, still not enough to contain the landslip of ...”