Encountering Primo Levi

This book considers Primo Levi's development as a writer expressed through multiple literary genres and increasing awareness of his readers over the course of his forty-year writing career. The book focuses on memory and trauma, and how narrative acts as a means of telling a story and engaging others in the transmission of that story, thus developing a literary lineage over time that can transcend geographic and cultural limitations. As the witness of catastrophic historical events, Levi's writing offers a space to consider what it means to be a reader of traumatic literature. The process of how books affect and change us is explored through a close reading of Levi's works alongside related writers and the historical contexts in which they lived.