Un'assurda abbondanza. Levi e Swift

The main focus of the essay is the influence of Gulliver’s Travels on Primo Levi’s writing. Starting from La ricerca delle radici, where Levi includes Swift’s book as one of the crucial readings of his youth, the essay examines the importance of book III and IV of the Travels: they can be considered as an ensemble of imaginative experiments that Levi had in mind while exploring the relationship between language and ideol- ogy in I sommersi e i salvati and the relationship between reason and the repression of the body in his sci-fi stories (in particular Storie naturali). Following Giuseppe Sertoli’s psychoanalytical reading of Gulliver, the essay tries to understand how Levi deals with these two relationships – deeply connected to each other – and how he represents them in his literary work