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.
