The Drowned and the Saved

Shortly after completing THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, Primo Levi committed suicide. The matter of his death was sudden, violent and unpremiditated, and there were some who argue that he killed himself because he was tormented by guilt - guilt that he had survived the horrors of Auschwitz while others, better than he, had gone to the wall. THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED is Levi's impassioned attempt to understand the 'rationale' behind the concentration camps, was completed shortly before his tragic death in 1987. THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED dispels the myth that Primo Levi forgave the Germans for what they did to his people. He didn't and couldn't forgive. He refused, however, to indulge in what he called 'the bestial vice of hatred' which is an entirely different matter. The voice that sounds in his writing is that of a reasonable man...it warns and reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again. A would-be tyrant is waiting in the wings, with 'beautiful words' on his lips. The book is constantly impressing on us the need to learn from the past, to make sense of the senseless' PAUL BAILEY

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Levi writes of unspeakable things with charity, clarity and objectivity SUNDAY TIMES Levi's work is a model of patience and hard-won enlightenment, a search for illumination in places where there appeared to be none. DAILY TELEGRAPH It is, as always, an intellectual and aesthetic pleasure to follow the perfection of style, the manner of exposition, both subtle and lucid. OBSERVER The horror of what he reveals is made all the more terrifying by a prose style which is cool, clear and unsparing. The most powerful message to emerge from this book is that we must learn the lessons of history so as not to repeat its mistakes. YORKSHIRE POST

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Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and trained as a chemist. Arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war, he was deported to Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his two classic autobiographical works, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE TRUCE.

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