The Search for Roots

by Primo Levi

translated and edited by Peter Forbes

When the Italian publisher Guilio Bolatti invited Primo Levi to compile a personal anthology, he accepted "with curiosity"(it has been said that curiosity was Levi' truest muse). He undertook the project with a certain, and increasing, trepidation – " halfway through the journey I felt naked ...the reader who wishes can enter the passage and cast an eye on the ecosystem that lodges unsuspected in my depths, saprophytes, birds of day and night, creepers, butterflies, crickets and fungi"

The Search for Roots was the result, and was first published in Italy in 1981. Extraordinarily, it has not, until now, been published in English. The Search for Roots comprises thirty extracts, pieces of great importance to him, each with an introduction by Levi. As Peter Forbes notes in his introduction, the whole has "a beguiling flavour of serious but unacademic reading, of a kind of chastened curiosity rare in our time, and of an undiminished sense of wonder and horror at a universe that has such things in it."

The Search for Roots reminds us once again how wide and passionate were Levi's interests, ranging here, and with many acknowledged omissions, from The Book of Job to The Origin of Species, from Marco Polo to Joseph Conrad, from Lucretius's On the Nature of the Universe to Arthur C Clarke, all by way of Rabelais, Thomas Mann, and the American Society for Testing Materials.

As Italo Calvino writes in his Afterword, such a juxtaposition of texts can become not only a kind of autobiography, but also an affirmation of values, a manifesto. Every one of Levi's thirty introductions contributes to this "manifesto"; here are the final words of his introduction to the final extract, a piece on "The Search for Black Holes": "if the human mind has conceived Black Holes, and dares to speculate on what happened in the first moments of creation, why should it not know how to conquer fear, poverty and grief"?

If you've read The Search for Roots, email your comments to me at

peter.forbes2@virgin.net

Primo Levi, The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology published by Penguin on June 27, 2002,
price £7.99 paperback

You can buy it from Amazon

"I have read a great deal because I come from a family for whom reading was an innocent and traditional vice, a gratifying habit, a mental exercise, an obligatory and compulsive way of killing time, and a sort of fairy wand bestowing wisdom."

– Primo Levi

From Reviews:

"Everything we look for in and know about Levi – the Holocaust, his chemistry, his science fiction – is distilled here into the extracts and into the brief, throwaway introduction to each one"
Rober S. C. Gordon, The Spectator

"This is vintage Levi, the authentic voice...This book is a fascinating journey, as Levi himself promised, through "the ecosystem lodged in my depths".

Peter Walker, Financial Times

"This thoughful anthology, which appears twenty years ater the Italian edition, 15 years after the death of its complier, demonstrates the breadth of Primo Levi's interests and sympathies, from miniature science fiction narratives to poetry and technical papers".

Adam Mars-Jones The Observer

"Anyone dipping into this book should soon find something to interest him or her, whether it is an extract form Swift, or Thomas Mann, or the French science fiction wrter who gave the world the word 'astronaut' in 1925".

John Gross, The Sunday Telegraph Books