Customer Reviews

The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays

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hilariously insightful; primo levi doesn't usually strike across as a fantasy writer, nonetheless, his un-apologetic personality comes through these intricate stories, written to reflect various avenue in the nature of human beings.

Primo Levi, Italian Jew, survivor of Auschwitz, author of "The Periodic Table" (21 stories each connected by a chemical element to tale), died at the age of 68. The official record has it that his fall from his three-storied apartment was a suicide. Some of his friends believed he killed himself others were convinced that he had already died 40 years before in Auschwitz. His life and death are relevant to those who enjoy his written work because they were pieces that aligned with the stories he wrote and the thoughts that he mused in his essays. Primo Levi was a writer whose thoughts drill into the deepest depths of intellectual darkness to, as he described his own approach in "Translating Kafka" (one of the essays in The Mirror Maker) to light. Yet somehow, reading his stories and essays, we might find it difficult to separate the emotions that drove him this way and that from the clarity of his analysis of life. His was a difficult mind to access and comprehend, but he was a writer of clarity and brilliance. It is this kind of admixture that makes writers like Primo Levi so fascinating. The stories and essays in "The Mirror Maker" were all very short, very clear and scarily thought provoking. My favourite essays from this collection were "Translating Kafka" and "Bacteria Roulette", and of the stories, "They were made to be Together" and "Through the Walls". The reader will find his work a mirror reflecting aspects of Primo Levi's life as well as his own; and we should understand that the paths life has for each of us are more myriad than the Cretan Labyrinths of the Minotaur. We must not only feel our way out but also think our way out. After all, as the author wrote (in "The Moon and the Man") that man is strong because "of the many weapons nature offered the animals, he opted for the brain".