If This Is a Man & The Truce

Primo Levi’s account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. “If This is a Man” describes his deportation to Poland and the 20 months he spent working in Auschwitz. “The Truce” covers his journey home to Italy at the end of the war.

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi’s writing isn’t just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known’ PHILIP ROTH