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work, life experiences and beliefs. The variety of the sources effectively conveys the complex and multi-layered nature of Levi’s thought and works, as well as the driving constants that shaped his literature and rationalist worldview. As Giorgio Calcagno notes in his foreword, the mosaic of scattered pieces woven together by the authors “reveal a man consistent with his contradictions, coherent precisely because he is multifaceted, secure in its roots, while curious about new developments.” (ix) A number of elements stand out from this composition: Levi’s clarity of judgment, his love for his profession, the insistence on always thinking for oneself, a faith in the Enlightenment, but also the awareness that there is something beyond reason. The precision and firmness with which Levi expresses his ideas is also remarkable. Throughout the volume it becomes clear that interviews are for Levi a way of expanding his stories, adding details recovered from his memory, elucidating the difficult passages, re-examining his old selves and thoughts. Like Odysseus in the palace of Alcineus, Levi gives an account of himself and re-lives troubled periods of its life. Yet the co-authors do not always consider whether Levi’s statements are totally accurate and how they “give form” to the past. As Mario Barenghi writes in Why do we believe Primo Levi? (Einaudi, 2013), past events “in order to be preserved, must be modified” (22). What matters is “the moral value of the experience,” how Levi constructs and gives meaning to his living experience, shedding light on the more obscure and hidden areas of his self. For example, Levi said that when he was young he considered his Jewish origin “a small, cheerful anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles” (227). However, recent scholarship has shown that Levi tended to downplay the importance of his Jewish upbringing. The fact that some of Levi’s statements are not adequately probed raises a bigger issue. Why has this book been translated now, twenty-five years after its original version, and after The Voice of Memory (Polity, 2001), a collection of interviews edited by Robert S. C. Gordon and Marco Belpoliti? A translated version of this book made sense twenty years ago, when the critical literature on Levi in English was not so vast, but in 2017 this book appears dated. Next year Einaudi will publish the complete collection of Levi’s interviews (volume III of his Opere complete). It would have been better to wait and translate this new collection, which contains unpublished material.