Synopses & Reviews
The Search for Roots is a collection of writings that Primo Levi considered to be essential reading. Beginning with the Book of Job, that drama of the just oppressed by injustice, these thirty pieces, with introductions by Levi, reflect his profound knowledge of science and deep passion for literature, and his survival of Auschwitz making it an anthology that is both universal and poignantly autobiographical. Levi suggests four routes through these writings, four ways of understanding the human predicament and of achieving partial salvation in an apparently indifferent universe: through laughter, through knowledge, and through understanding the injustice of suffering and the stature of man. With this in mind, he presents familiar voices: Swift, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Arthur C. Clarke, for example, and introduces us to less familiar ones: Lucretius, Giuseppe Belli, Fredric Brown, Stefano D Arrigo, and Hermann Langbein. Most of the pieces, as Levi comments, reflect the fundamental dichotomies that face us all: falsehood/truth, laughter/tears, judgment/folly, hope/despair, triumph/disaster. As Peter Forbes writes in his Introduction, In the context of the twenty-first century, all of Levi s choices are striking; they exhibit a kind of chastened curiosity rare in our time, and an undiminished sense of wonder and horror at a universe that has such things in it.
Synopsis
It is not my job to explain why...the reader who wishes can enter the passage and cast an eye on the ecosystem that lodges unsuspected in my depths, saprophytes, birds of day and night, creepers, butterflies, crickets, and fungi. Primo Levi emerged not only as one of the most profound and haunting commentators on the Holocaust but also as a great writer on many twentieth-century themes. Here is an anthology of writings that he considered to be essential reading. As Peter Forbes says in his Introduction, In the context of the twenty-first century, all of Levi's choices are striking; they exhibit a kind of chastened curiosity rare in our time, and an undiminished sense of wonder and horror at a universe that has such things in it. Most of the pieces, as Levi comments, reflect the fundamental dichotomies that face us all. Many have their roots in Levi's experience of Auschwitz, and in their startling juxtaposition they give the impression of a world turned upside down. One of the most important Italian writers. --Umberto Eco