Modern Luck

Abstract

This book has taken shape over a number of years -too many years -and it began in a dark place. As I was working in the early 2000s on the remarkable Holocaust writer and survivor Primo Levi, I noticed how often he turned to an idea of luck or good fortune as part of his 'explanation' for the awful suffering that had befallen him at Auschwitz and for the impossibly improbable fact of his survival. Levi was a marvellously articulate and sensitive thinker about so many aspects of his own history and that of millions like him, and his probing of the role of luck was no exception. But my second realization was that he was far from alone: every Holocaust survivor I read or heard seemed to return to the theme, insistently, anxiously. Every story of survival was a story of good luck. I began to wonder about the implications of this beyond the concentration camps and hiding places of the Second World War. If, as many have posited, the Holocaust encapsulated some dark essence of modernity, and if luck was such a persistent trope in stories told about it, was there some underlying tie that bound luck, or stories told about luck, to modernity? This is the question that lies at the heart of this book. Although it turns to the Holocaust more than once, in particular in Chapter 6, it deliberately goes out of its way to step beyond it, to explore over the course of its eight chapters the role of luck and luck stories across as broad a canvas as I could paint of the literary, cinematic and cultural field from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the 'long twentieth century' of my subtitle. I also took the decision to step outside the narrow confines of my own specialist field, Italian literature and cinema (although I draw regularly on this too), in order to tap into the wider (indeed universal) resonances and affective pull of this short simple word, luck, which pervades so much of our self-perception and underpins so many of the stories we tell about our own lives, the fictions that accompany it. This has made the work on the book challenging, for sure, but also consistently enriching and pleasurable, a genuine journey of discovery as I tapped into the energy that this concept seems to transmit to all those who have x PREFACE tackled it, myself included. The shadow of the dark place where I started, however, never quite went away. Luck stories are not only stories with happy endings, after all; they are also reminders of the fragility and danger that always lie only a moment away. Just as I was finishing the book, war broke out over the very same area of Eastern Europe that Levi and his few companions travelled across in 1945, on their long and unlikely journey home.All the time spent on this book has left me with too many people to thank properly for their help, advice and patience. I have presented workin-progress and received precious feedback in various forums: a public lecture hosted by the Centro studi internazionale Primo Levi, Turin (thanks to Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa), followed by lectures at t...