'Argon', the story which opens The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico, 1975), contains an important and often-quoted digression. While sketching the history of the Jews in Piedmont, and the mixture of Piedmontese dialect and Hebrew expressions used in the various communities, Levi points out that what makes this mixture funny is the intrinsic cultural and structural contrast between the two languages. From there he goes on to identify contrasts and conflicts as a central component of all Diaspora Jewish cultures and their humour; and then he generalizes even further, attributing contrasts to all human nature, and therefore - implicitly - to all humour:

The assertion that to be a human being is to be a tangle (groviglio) of incompatible elements which cannot be reconciled seems partly to contradict another of Levi's frequently quoted statements, that his writing is a deliberate progression 'from darkness to light'. The notion of linear movement towards the 'light' has been consistently refuted by Levi research in the past ten years: scholars have revealed the complexities within his work, providing insights into his ambivalent views on communication, science, writing, Jewishness and more.

Primo Levi disclaimed the role of prophet or seer, describing himself instead as 'a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual' (Racconti e saggi ('Stories and Essays', 1986; selections in The Mirror Maker), pp. 3-4; OII, 859). This self-description, with its characteristically wry modesty and its equally characteristic foregrounding of curiosity about phenomena 'metaphorical and actual', recalls Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, central to the famous chapter, known to English-speaking readers as 'The Canto of Ulysses' ('Il canto di Ulisse'), in his first book, If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947), implicitly equating the 'maelstrom' (vortice) of the Lager with the 'whirlwind' (turbo; Inferno 26, l. 137) which sweeps Ulysses' ship to destruction, while the 'virtue' (virtù) to which Levi refuses to attribute his own survival is compared to the 'virtue and knowledge' (virtute e canoscenza, l. 120) the pursuit of which Ulysses enjoins on his crew as the activity which distinguishes men from beasts. Tellingly, both words derive from the Latin virtus: the courage and worth which is fitting for a man, and which the Nazi death camps were designed to strip from their victims.

As he tells us at the start of If This is a Man, the maelstrom engulfed Levi in January 1944 when, along with his fellow internees in the detention camp at Fossoli, near Modena, he received what was in effect a coded death sentence: 'on the morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill.

Although Primo Levi is now firmly established as one of the essential voices of 'The Age of Camps', in Zygmunt Bauman's grim description of the twentieth century, his canonization is a relatively recent occurrence. Levi did not acquire a mass readership, outside of Italy, until the mid-1980s. In early specialist studies of Holocaust literature, he was universalized as one among many who 'speaks a common truth, one known to all writers of the Holocaust'. It was only after the 1984 translation of The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico, 1975) in the United States that he was transformed into a global figure and gained a large international readership. This transformation contrasts starkly with Levi's own unease in The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati, 1986) about the stereotypical representations of the Holocaust which had increasingly appropriated his life and work. In fact, Levi was a particularly unenthusiastic employer of the term'Holocaust': 'I use this term “Holocaust” reluctantly because I do not like it. But I use it to be understood. Philologically, it is a mistake.' As his biographers have noted, he was also especially uncomfortable at being categorized principally as a 'Jewish writer' in the United States: '“They put a label onme”, he stated in one public lecture, “I don't like labels. Germans do.”'

As Marco Belpoliti has rightly argued, Levi's most consistent self-image in his interviews was as a 'hybrid' or 'centaur' which 'does not only represent the presence of opposites, but also . . . an unstable union destined to break down' (Voice of Memory, p. xx). This creative instability can be found in Levi's complex identity as chemist and writer, witness and writer, Jew and Italian, as well as his always 'impure' narrative voice with its self-conscious 'hybrid input' (The Search for Roots (La ricerca delle radici, 1981), p. 3; OII, 1361) of differing kinds of materials: poetry, testimony, science and fiction.

In an interview with Gabriella Poli in 1976, Primo Levi explained that all his books had been born in pairs, as twins: two books on his Lager experience - If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947) and The Truce (La tregua, 1963) - were followed by two collections of science-fiction short-stories - Storie naturali ('Natural Histories', 1966) and Vizio di forma ('Formal Defect', 1971) (partly collected in a single volume in English, The Sixth Day). The unconventional and heterogeneous (auto)biography of an inorganic chemist, The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico, 1975) was planned to be paired with a book on the trade of an organic chemist, with the working title of Il doppio legame ('The Double Bond'). Levi never completed this book; instead he paired The Periodic Table with the fourteen stories of The Wrench (La chiave a stella, 1978), centred on a highly skilled Piedmontese master rigger, Libertino Faussone. This particular coupling might look looser than the others, but it has striking significance for our understanding of Levi's work. Its prime effect is to underscore the challenge Levi presents to abstract, systematic notions of scientific knowledge (implicit in the image and concept of the 'sistema periodico'), in favour of the technical, applied skills common to both the (inorganic) chemist and the rigger. At the centre of Levi's concerns in these two books, in other words, is the idea of knowledge as being both a material and existential construction rather than a purely abstract or theoretical one, as well as a notion of the unity of art (as craft) and technology, at both the experimental and manual levels. Taken together, the diptych of The Periodic Table and The Wrench offers one of the most interesting of modern representations - in philosophical, epistemological, aesthetic and ethical terms - of what Levi would call the homo faber, man as maker or tool-maker, the fabricator and artist who works upon hard material such as stone or wood.

Primo Levi holds an 'insider-outsider' place in Italian literature, which continues to exercise critics, just as it exercised Levi himself, who labelled himself 'the writer who is not a writer' (The Black Hole of Auschwitz, pp. 101; OI, 1202). But this apparently single, lengthy debate about where to place him in the canon actually covers many separate issues, pertinent to other authors besides Levi. Amongst the hotly debated questions are: was he primarily an Italian writer or part of a wider or narrower community - in Levi's case scientific, Jewish, moralist, rationalist, memorialist? Was he a writer of fictions or rather an essayist, autobiographer or chronicler? Was he a great writer, or somebody destined to write about great things?

Recent critical writing on Levi, in Italy and beyond, reveals that the commonest topic is Memory, almost exclusively Levi's position in the memorial literature of the Holocaust. Slightly less frequent are discussions of Levi as a moralist. Again the focus is on keeping alive the lessons of a chronologically receding, but morally ever-pertinent, personal and universal wrong. After these 'great' themes, whose terms are often dictated by external values and militant agendas Levi himself sometimes rejected, we finally reach intellectual and artistic concerns with which the author was explicitly engaged: the role of reason and science in life and literature, the value of work and place, the hidden trace of language as clue to our past, the fragile nature of artistic creativity. On Levi's craft as a writer, and on his literary standing, there is surprisingly little. Even the three major biographies in English, by Angier, Anissimov and Thomson, concentrate on the extraordinary aspects of his life (including the challenge of being 'ordinary'), rather than on the culture of his writing. He is arguably the victim of mass selective memory, remembered for why he wrote, particularly at the beginning and end of his career, rather than how he wrote.

Turin was Primo Levi's city. Born, bred and schooled there, he lived at number 75 Corso Umberto for the entirety of his life, save two forced absences, the first as a consequence of the Racial Laws when he found work in Milan, the second during his detention in the death camps. Turin and the cultural climate that had grown up in and around the city in the post- Risorgimento period onwards were vital components of Levi's world. Without placing him within this context it is hard for us to understand him fully as a writer, as a witness and as an individual. If Levi can be characterized not only as a rationalist, a late Enlightenment intellectual with a sceptical, analytical mind and faith in the power and integrity of positivist science, but also as someone who held dear a progressive liberal and anti- Fascist set of values, that is in no small part due to the cultural history of Turin.

Turin as capital

The Turin of the generation of Cesare Levi (1878-1942), Primo's father, was a city on the rebound from a period of crisis and humiliation. In the light of what Turin and Piedmont represented for Italy at unification it made sense that Turin be designated Italy's first capital. The city itself, and the Piedmont region with it, were by far the most modern and enlightened of the states that made up pre-Risorgimento Italy; city and region boasted an entrepreneurial middle class and a forward-looking ruling class; the city was on a par, or almost, with the nation that was its northerly neighbour and with which it enjoyed close contact: France.

Primo Levi's personal position on being a Jew has been enigmatic, both for himself and for his readers and critics. He himself made differing statements on his Jewish identity: in an interview with Giuseppe Grieco, he makes it clear that he had a religious upbringing and that he has a Jewish identity that he has 'no intention of discarding' (Voice of Memory, p. 275); but elsewhere he relegates Jewish identity to a very small element of his overall identity and plays down the strength of his religious education (e.g. The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico, 1975), pp. 35-6; OI, 770).

The origins of some aspects of the complexity in Levi's relation to his Judaism are to be found in his embracing of so-called 'secular' or 'cultural' Judaism, most commonly defined as a bond with Jewish tradition and culture that creates a Jewish identity for which religious observation is a matter of choice rather than of spiritual conviction. He is often described and perceived as an assimilated Jew, because his immediate family was not Orthodox, and because he declared often that he had little spiritual conviction; but this alone does not capture the complexity of his and his family's rapport with their Judaism and their similarities to the Jewish community around them. In fact, in the strength of their identification with Jewish culture and in their relatively regular observance of religious ritual and calendars, Levi's family was typical of many Italian Jewish families at the time. They were perhaps closer to what contemporary British or American Jews would call, respectively, Reform or Conservative Judaism. Levi had a Bar Mitzvah at the typical age of thirteen, involving two years of religious preparation for the event, which at first he took seriously and with some fervour. At the time, he even vowed to wear tefillin, or phylacteries, but he was partly inspired, he later said, by the promise of a reward for his piety from his family, in the form of a new bicycle.

One of the key problems of writing and thinking about what we now call the Holocaust has been that of finding apt working tools for representing and understanding, for forging a language in which to write about such a phenomenon. Back in Turin in late 1945 and 1946, only months after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, as he wrote the stories that would make up If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947), Primo Levi was already struck forcefully by the problems of language and representation which would so trouble generations of reflection on the Holocaust to come. There are at least three key moments in that book where Levi sets out these problems in stark relief:

Hobbes's Leviathan is arguably the most brilliant and influential political treatise ever written in English, and it certainly stands as the first major work of English political philosophy embedded in an encyclopaedic corpus. But it has long awaited an authoritative English critical edition and was until recently rarely read in its entirety. Even in Germany, where pioneering bibliographical work on Hobbes's texts was undertaken by Ferdinand Tönnies, an important political theorist in his own right, Hobbes was mostly read in an abridged edition that omitted the last two books, which comprise more than half the length of the original work. These two books, 'Of a Christian Commonwealth' and 'Of the Kingdom of Darkness', are important sources for Hobbes's theology, and were very controversial in his day. Recent critical debate suggests that they are now again controversial.

In Leviathan Hobbes gave institutional sanction to the principle on which the great schism created by the Protestant Reformation was decided: cuius regio eius religio; it was up to the godly prince to decide religious orthodoxy. On this principle, the peace of Westphalia of 1648, which closed half a century of religious wars and marked the creation of the modern international system of states, was founded. Sect and schism are persistent topoi of Hobbes's works, beginning with his 1645 debate with Bishop Bramhall in Paris, conducted under the auspices of the Earl of Newcastle but published only in 1654, and dominating his works of the 1660s, written when Hobbes was himself under threat of indictment for blasphemy and possible heresy.