Perhaps partly because I've just been reading a novel about a WWII Russian spy by Alan Furst, and also because I've always been interested in that era (Gitta Sereny's majestic biography of Albert Speer, Hitler's Willing Executioners – which I read, incongruously, on a beach in Fuertaventura – If This Is A Man, Stalingrad and, absurdly, Wolfenstein), I was struck by the beauty and mystery of this picture, taken by Mark Hogencamp in Marwencol, the miniaturised battleground he built in his own back garden while recovering from a beating that left him brain-damaged. His tragic story has been turned into a documentary.Found via the website Look At This Little Thing!
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Did you see Primo Levi when he came to Glasgow University ? Not long before he died. Very interesting.
murmur.
No, I wish I had; I didn't even know he had visited. What did he say?
I read If This Is A Man on a train from London to Edinburgh. It's an amazing book.
I love that book, if that is the right word.
He mainly talked about The Periodic Table as I recall. Very dapper fellow. Still like to think that he tumbled instead of jumped.
I read a biography by Ian Thomson which was inconclusive about what happened - I suppose because no one really knows. [The biography is not very good, although it gets glowing reviews on Amazon.)
Even allowing for the Orlando Figes debacle, I'm convinced that people get paid by publishers to write positive reviews on Amazon. The disconnect between my reading experiences and the "reviews" is often bewildering.
Yes - one of the reviewers, in a short-ish review, said "Kudos to Ian Thomson!" by way of sign-off cum endorsement. Which is a deeply vacuous thing to say, and raises doubts about the entire review, suggesting as it does that this is the sort of person who would never read a book about Primo Levi. (Am I being too harsh?)
No. I just read the five reviews on amazon.co.uk and at least three of them are boilerplate rubbish that could be about anyone. Money must have changed hands.
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