Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence (1991): Martin Amis rilegge Primo Levi

In his novel 'Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense' (1991), Martin Amis explicitly refers to the importance of the work of Primo Levi and his reflections
on the holocaust. Amis also expressed the critical influence of 'If This is a Man and 'The Drowned and the Saved'. In this testimonial we are taken back by the main character of Time's Arrow, with purpose. Testimony is told in a reverse chronology, which typically fits into a Picaresque narrative system, where the individual is unreliable - promoting the memory of a criminal, in an ambitious, grotesque, revisionist project of holocaust history seen backwards. The centerpiece of Levi's narrative, and of the prisoner's jargon, is the cruel aseptic words such as the "final solution" or "special treatment". The picar warns the reader about the confusion between the roles victim and slave, and how this fact gives a justification to the more subtle forms of revisionism and historical forgiveness. While Levi fought with the reason and logic of the Scientist in every attempt to mitigate the history of Jewish persecution (even refusing The term "holocaust", considered by him too conciliatory), the protagonist of Amis, betraying free picaresque thinking, ends up searching for mythological roots, and then justification.