Primo Levi kills himself again and again. It’s been twenty-six years since he flung himself from the fourth floor of his apartment building, and for many people the circumstances of his death still take precedence over the deathlessness of his work. Levi left no suicide note, but for a writer of such dignified restraint, for a witness who withheld much of what he saw and felt, that isn’t surprising. He didn’t choose the surer and less violent means of poison, and although that might seem suspicious for a chemist sickened by violence, his suicide bears every mark of desperate impulsivity. Poison required a planning Levi simply could not muster, while falling over a fourth-floor railing took only a second’s small effort. That Levi was born and brought up in the very building in Turin which served as his means of destruction is a too-neat poeticism that probably would have disgusted him—he who eschewed ostentation and the gloat of the damned—which is another reason not to doubt his suicide but to see it as an immediate and irrepressible urge against another day’s pain.

In his new book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, philosopher and Shoah scholar Berel Lang reminds us that Levi’s health had been in shambles for years, owing mostly to a prostate condition, the surgery for which left him uncomfortable and incontinent. The fanged melancholy that had infected him since youth had returned and offered no promise of abatement. Although Levi either downplayed or denied its lingering severity, his eleven-month hell in Auschwitz forty-three years earlier had knifed out a crucial element of his spirit. Like many of the repatriated—and despite marriage, fatherhood and a laudable career as a chemist and, later, as an author—Levi had a difficult time fully trusting the chrysalis of civilization after Auschwitz. He was a man of unflinching probity who never succumbed to the cutthroat Hobbesian conception of human striving, or to that toxic strain of bitterness which contaminated and ultimately ended the writer Jean Améry (also a Shoah survivor and suicide). But there is sometimes in Levi’s work the itchy suspicion that the hell could happen again, or that it never really ended.

Beneath that unperturbed and almost placid prose creeps a fatalism, a capitulation before the vastitude and depravity of what he named “the demolition of man.” The stupefied silence before this vastitude and depravity is part of why his work remains ever pregnant and never born, because “our language lacks words to express this offense.” Lang is particularly adept at addressing our kneejerk linguistic and conceptual reactions to Auschwitz: “ineffable,” “unimaginable,” “incomprehensible,” etc. The subject resists irony and apothegm alike. As a scientist, Levi didn’t surrender to the convenient belief that some human agency is beyond explication, even though he himself could offer no answer to such demonical madness. The mind doesn’t seem to know what to do with the Shoah, and the heart never even tried to understand.

Eight days before committing suicide in 1950, Levi’s near-contemporary Cesare Pavese wrote a final diary entry: “Not words. An act.” Upon Levi’s suicide, Elie Wiesel famously said that we could engrave Levi’s name among the six million incinerated by the Third Reich. In her essay “Primo Levi’s Suicide Note,” Cynthia Ozick suggests: “The composition of the last Lager manuscript was complete, the heart burned out; there was no more to tell.” (She refers to The Drowned and the Saved; “Lager” was Levi’s term for the death camps.) For Levi, as for Pavese, an act only now. His books, erroneously accused of being too sunny or too neutral, too suffused with scientific integrity, shame the barbarous Catholic notion that suffering leads to deliverance and is of itself holy. Suffering isn’t holy. To steal from Randall Jarrell’s formulation, we can’t call pain by another name in hope of diminishing its sting. Pain is pain: worthless, wasteful, replete with barren wrath.

We do not behold the lives and work of Walter Benjamin or Virginia Wolff through the cracked prisms of their self-destruction, but Primo Levi is a special case. Lang speaks of the emotional investment we had in Levi, the optimist and survivor: he who emerged whole from the perdition of Hitlerism, who through the most arbitrary luck and against every odd endured to document the flames, the social contagion and moral catastrophe he quit trying to comprehend. His survival and testimony was one of the bantam victories against the Final Solution. His suicide, then, meant for some one more body added to the hideous count, meant a nullifying of that victory. But part of the skill of Lang’s approach is his even-keeled testing of the unknowables: given Levi’s saturnine disposition and family history of depression and suicide—his paternal grandfather leapt to his death from a window—there’s no way to be certain of Wiesel’s claim that Auschwitz succeeded in killing Levi.