SOURCE: “Questions of Survival,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 1988, p. 520.

In the following review, Lepschy derides Raymond Rosenthal's translation of The Drowned and the Saved.

“Explicit recipes for being human”: thus Paul Bailey, in his introduction to the English translation of Primo Levi's last book, I sommersi e i salvati (reviewed in the TLS, October 2, 1987), applies Geoffrey Grigson's definition of Auden's best poetry to the work of Levi. Bailey follows the thread of “being human” through a world of inhumanity and emphasizes the centrality of Levi's belief that “The aims of life are the best defence against death: and not only in the Lager”—a belief which renders his suicide the more poignant. As Bailey says, The Drowned and the Saved “is a book in which the questions outnumber the answers, for all Levi's brave attempts to explain the inexplicable”. What sort of society can ideate and execute...