Interpreting Primo Levi

The chemist Levi, perhaps till his retirement from the profession in 1977, was not considered a “true” writer. Levi found an answer for this phenomenon, speaking of himself as a “centaur”, and not only as far as the profession was concerned: “Italian, but Jewish. Chemist, but writer. Deported, but not so much (or not always) willing to complain and to file a complaint, writer but witness (or vice versa)”. Two identities that, due to the idea of literature in which it was formed, generated misunderstanding or misreadings. It is, in the Italian critical debate, the question of literary or discursive genre, and the status of documentary narrative vs fiction. The editorial history of If This is a man is paradigmatic. The documentary substance, combined with the plenty of considerations of general scope, move the text from the area of the memorial to that of the “essay”.A discussion of the most recent studies about Primo Levi's writing as testimony and as fictional texts