I was given The Complete Works of Primo Levi as a birthday present.  It wasn’t a surprise gift: in fact I was shameless about dropping hints.  I’m so glad I did.  It’s a beautiful set, three volumes and nearly three thousand pages, a tribute to the art and craft of publishing and a fitting monument to a wonderful writer.

Primo Levi’s fame, his reputation, and his status as one of the leading figures of 20th century literature derive to a great degree from his searing account of the year he spent in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man.  This collection reveals how much more there was to Levi.  Levi the poet, the essayist, the endlessly curious traveler to the heart of the human condition.

Primo Levi died in 1987, most likely by his own hand.  Although his simple gravestone bears only his name, the years of his life, and the sequence of numbers tattooed on his arm by the Nazis, 174517, these books are the most fitting memorial the world could have given to a great writer and an even greater man, a definitive collection of the gifts he gave to us.