The Cold War, Multilingualism, and the Epistemology of Participation in Primo Levi’s The Truce

Abstract

This paper focuses on multilingualism and intercultural communication in Primo Levi’s autobiographical narrative The Truce (1963), in the framework of a non-universalist view of world literature and the concept of “significant geographies.” The interpretation aims to discover how the historical moment of pre-Cold War armistice is related to transnational movements, the experience of displacement, and intercultural or interlinguistic encounters. Reading several key scenes and passages, I claim that the narrator’s strategies convey a participatory anthropological approach to the understanding of foreignness, which is also evidenced by a subtle and multilayered irony. Some of Primo Levi’s other fiction and nonfiction is used to frame this discussion of The Truce.