If This Is A Man/The Truce
'Miraculous' Philippe Sands
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4.9 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A new edition of Primo Levi's classic memoir of the Holocaust, with an introduction by David Baddiel, author of Jews Don't Count
'With the moral stamina and intellectual poise 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... One of the greatest human testaments of the era' Philip Roth
'Levi's voice is especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity... If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages' Philippe Sands
'The death of Primo Levi robs Italy of one of its finest writers... One of the few survivors of the Holocaust to speak of his experiences with a gentle voice' Guardian
'[What] gave it such power... was the sheer, unmitigated truth of it; the sense of what a book could achieve in terms of expanding one's own knowledge and understanding at a single sitting... few writers have left such a legacy... A necessary book' Independent
Customer Reviews
Harrowing but Amazing Read
Best written personal account I have read from a wealth of holocaust writings.
THINK. QUESTION. RESOLVE.
It goes without saying that books and articles about the Holocaust need to be treated very carefully and with tremendous respect. IF THIS IS A MAN by Primo Levi is like this. This literary experience opens in a truly remarkable manner. It is at once incredibly moving, and immediately horrifying. You can’t read more than a handful of pages (or paragraphs, or lines of text even) without feeling overwhelmed and helpless and offended in the most extreme way possible. Conversely, phrases of note are come across early in the book, and the reader may well find themselves thinking how well that sentence was penned and how nicely it sits in the reader’s mind. And in the next heartbeat, you may well admonish yourself for finding joy and discovering anything of note in the words that describe such a terrible, terrible place.
Chapter one is given the title, ’THE JOURNEY’ and chapter two is called, ’ON THE BOTTOM’. The opening salvo leaves the reader with a feeling of impending doom (bordering on terror) but chapter two has a much greater emotional impact. Chapter three shows that some prisoners held on to hope longer than others; indeed, the book’s narrator appears to have lost all hope by the start of chapter four. He meets up with a friend from BEFORE who blesses the reader with this delightful quote (taken from location 635 of the kindle version) in answer to the question of why waste tine and effort keeping yourself clean with soap when all signs of personal and soulful hygiene are lost within a few seconds of stepping beyond the washroom?
“... We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent...”
ITIAM is an extraordinary reading experience; and it is a hideous reading experience. You don’t really know what to think, and you don’t really know where to look. Truth has the peculiar habit of sneaking up on you and staring you right in the face. All you can do is stare back.
Think.
Question.
Resolve.
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As the book approaches its finale, and as Levi returns home, the reader comes across quotes of text that approach literary highlights and significant moments of the tome itself.
What a book. What an experience. What a nightmare.
BFN Greggorio!