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The Double Bond: The Life of Primo Levi
One of the most eagerly awaited biographies of recent years, a "meticulous and visionary"* life of the great Italian writer and witness to the Holocaust
Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which include Survival in Auschwitz , The Reawakening , and the classic The Periodic Table , he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born.
Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched, vivid, and moving biography, which illuminates the design of Levi's interior how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. Carole Angier 's biography of Jean Rhys (1990) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and won the Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction. She is the Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, and lives in Oxfordshire. Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which include Survival in Auschwitz , The Reawakening , and his autobiographical masterpiece The Periodic Table , he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born.
Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched biography, which illuminates the design of Levi's interior how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but also between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. "[A] vastly detailed and intricately layered biography . . . Meticulous and visionary . . . The entwined complexities and contradictions of man and writer are caught in Angier's vastly detailed and intricately layered biography."— Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review "Meticulous and visionary . . . The entwined complexities and contradictions of man and writer are caught in Angier's vastly detailed and intricately layered biography."— Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
"Compelling and beautifully written . . . Ms. Angier's book is devoted to capturing the inner man as much as the outward circumstances of his life . . . [Her] detailed account of the ordeal in the camps is painstakingly presented and told with a respectful care."— Erich Eichman, The Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly unorthodox . . . [Angier] is Levi's perfect biographer—a natural foil for his own reluctance to reveal his real self—and her work is the perfect complement to his, daring and justified in each of its own liberties . . . Her book is a remarkable success. Not only for its own achievement, but also because it restores to Levi's life the dignity his death seemed to betray."— Alex Abramovich, The Village Voice
" The Double Bond has the pace and grip of a thriller. I could hardly put it down from the start to finish. Primo Levi was a natural storyteller whose fearful experiences in Auschwitz and elsewhere made him a great writer, and one of the twentieth century's prime witnesses. It cost him all he had to give. Carole Angier explores the dark secrets of his life and work with humane and moving clarity. She uses the unknown and unknowable as key structural elements—like holes in lace—in a biographical design as rich, intricate and mysterious as the nature of the man it mirrors."— Hilary Spurling, author of The Unknown Matisse
"Carole Angier has solved the almost intractable problems that Primo Levi sets for the modern biographer, with penetrating and audacious ingenuity. Using his own literary methods and complementing them, with intelligence and imagination, she gives us new insight into his character. His great mission was to bear witness during the last half of the twentieth century. Her inspired re-creation of his life and work will assist him to continue doing so well into the present century. It is a subtle and extraordinary achievement."— Michael Holroyd, author of Lytton Strachey
"Angier's life study succeeds because, beyond its diligence and probity, it is an exhaustive exercise of moral imagination. She openly subjects many of her own insights and conjectures to the question...
Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which include Survival in Auschwitz , The Reawakening , and the classic The Periodic Table , he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born.
Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched, vivid, and moving biography, which illuminates the design of Levi's interior how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. Carole Angier 's biography of Jean Rhys (1990) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and won the Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction. She is the Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, and lives in Oxfordshire. Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi spent sixty-five of his sixty-seven years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day and wrote at night in a study that had been his childhood bedroom. Thanks to his memoirs, which include Survival in Auschwitz , The Reawakening , and his autobiographical masterpiece The Periodic Table , he became widely known and loved as a supremely moral man, one who had transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding and clarity. The whole world was shocked when he died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he had been born.
Carole Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched biography, which illuminates the design of Levi's interior how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry and writing but also between hope and despair, and how the duty to testify released him to communicate, which was his deepest need. "[A] vastly detailed and intricately layered biography . . . Meticulous and visionary . . . The entwined complexities and contradictions of man and writer are caught in Angier's vastly detailed and intricately layered biography."— Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review "Meticulous and visionary . . . The entwined complexities and contradictions of man and writer are caught in Angier's vastly detailed and intricately layered biography."— Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
"Compelling and beautifully written . . . Ms. Angier's book is devoted to capturing the inner man as much as the outward circumstances of his life . . . [Her] detailed account of the ordeal in the camps is painstakingly presented and told with a respectful care."— Erich Eichman, The Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly unorthodox . . . [Angier] is Levi's perfect biographer—a natural foil for his own reluctance to reveal his real self—and her work is the perfect complement to his, daring and justified in each of its own liberties . . . Her book is a remarkable success. Not only for its own achievement, but also because it restores to Levi's life the dignity his death seemed to betray."— Alex Abramovich, The Village Voice
" The Double Bond has the pace and grip of a thriller. I could hardly put it down from the start to finish. Primo Levi was a natural storyteller whose fearful experiences in Auschwitz and elsewhere made him a great writer, and one of the twentieth century's prime witnesses. It cost him all he had to give. Carole Angier explores the dark secrets of his life and work with humane and moving clarity. She uses the unknown and unknowable as key structural elements—like holes in lace—in a biographical design as rich, intricate and mysterious as the nature of the man it mirrors."— Hilary Spurling, author of The Unknown Matisse
"Carole Angier has solved the almost intractable problems that Primo Levi sets for the modern biographer, with penetrating and audacious ingenuity. Using his own literary methods and complementing them, with intelligence and imagination, she gives us new insight into his character. His great mission was to bear witness during the last half of the twentieth century. Her inspired re-creation of his life and work will assist him to continue doing so well into the present century. It is a subtle and extraordinary achievement."— Michael Holroyd, author of Lytton Strachey
"Angier's life study succeeds because, beyond its diligence and probity, it is an exhaustive exercise of moral imagination. She openly subjects many of her own insights and conjectures to the question...
416 pages, Paperback
First published March 19, 2002
About the author
Carole Angier
17 books13 followersCarole Angier is the award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys (1985 & 1990). Her biography of the great Italian writer Primo Levi was published in the UK and the US in 2002 to critical acclaim. Carole was a teacher for many years before taking the plunge into full-time writing, teaching all forms of English (literature, creative writing, expository writing) for many institutions, including ten years as a tutor with the Open University. She also speaks Italian, French and German, though Carole says that she would not dare to write in them.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 7, 2011
First my pet peeves--too many Italian words that were not translated into English and in the beginning the book bogs down with the life stories of all of Primo's friends and realative. At least it feels like all of them.
Now my praise--this is an amazing biography of an amazing man. It's extremely well written and thoroughly researched. It's dense. It took me a long time to read, but I've always been curious about Primo Levi and who exactly he was. I got to the point that I wanted to finish, yet I didn't, because I knew what the end would be.
The preface is very interesting, makes many good points about the art of biography. The Levi family, at least his nuclear family, did not cooperate with the author. Some of his friends refused and many she had to court and cajole. She includes herself and her struggle to get these loyal companions to tell her what she wanted to know in the book. It's done very skillfully and I think it adds to the book, it doesn't detract from it, as it would with some writers.
This is a long, dense, very good book for anyone who wants to know, in detail, who Primo Levi was.
Now my praise--this is an amazing biography of an amazing man. It's extremely well written and thoroughly researched. It's dense. It took me a long time to read, but I've always been curious about Primo Levi and who exactly he was. I got to the point that I wanted to finish, yet I didn't, because I knew what the end would be.
The preface is very interesting, makes many good points about the art of biography. The Levi family, at least his nuclear family, did not cooperate with the author. Some of his friends refused and many she had to court and cajole. She includes herself and her struggle to get these loyal companions to tell her what she wanted to know in the book. It's done very skillfully and I think it adds to the book, it doesn't detract from it, as it would with some writers.
This is a long, dense, very good book for anyone who wants to know, in detail, who Primo Levi was.
August 6, 2020
A very difficult book to read. It took me 3 attempts over a 12 year period. Once I got into it, it made great lockdown reading.
January 4, 2018
Not a good choice as an introductory work on Primo Levi, since the author assumes her reader already has a good bit of familiarity with Levi’s writings as well as his life. She’s extrapolated much of her biographical data from his writings, so this book tends to be as much literary analysis as biography, and as such was largely inaccessible to me and unhelpful in introducing me to the man some have called the most moral man of the twentieth century.
Want to Read
August 12, 2007it's true i have a thing for biographies
July 31, 2009
A great, great biography. Thoroughly researched, smartly written, sensitive and nuanced.
June 24, 2019
Goodreads rating 70
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews