PRIMO LEVI’S UNIVERSE: A Writer’s Journey by Sam Magavern, foreward by Jonathan Rosen, afterword by Risa Sodi, Palgrave Macmillan, 240 pages, ($24.95)

There is no more haunting literary death in our time. Let Sam Magavern tell it in his careful and elegant way, and you’ll understand why this is an exemplary slender critical biography of a great 20th century writer: “Primo Levi died April 11, 1987, after his most severe episode of depression. His death was disturbing and mysterious: he fell over the third-floor balcony of an interior stairwell in his apartment building. Most, but not all, commentators have concluded that he took his own life. While the means of death may seem unlikely, his grandfather committed suicide in a nearly identical way, leaping from a second story window in 1888. . . . Unlike his grandfather who, because of his suicide, was denied burial in the regular Jewish cemetery, Levi received a normal burial because the Turin rabbi pronounced his death a case of ‘delayed murder by the Nazis.’ This seems wrong: Levi’s mental illness was not—in any obvious way—linked to his experiences in Auschwitz.”

Levi was always the most haunting, if not the most unusual, literary survivor of the Holocaust. The book that first had major impact across the ocean in translation was “The Periodic Table,” his masterpiece in which the camp survivor and chemist gives his characters and tales the properties of chemical elements. He doesn’t do it in a playful Calvino-esque way, though, but in the way of one who would write the great Holocaust memoirs, “Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Drowned and the Saved.”

Magavern is a professor at the University at Buffalo Law School. His father is a prominent Buffalo lawyer and his late mother was a mainstay in the English Department of the Buffalo Seminary. His book is a remarkable one.

—Jeff Simon