If This Is a Man and The Truce

Name: If This Is a Man and The Truce
Rating: 4.486486486486487 (37 reviews)
Author: Primo Levi
ISBN: 9780349100135

by Primo Levi, Stuart J. Woolf, Paul Bailey

4.5

(37 ratings)

398 pages1947AbacusISBN 9780349100135

ClassicsWarHistoryTranslationBiographyHolocaust Jewish (1939-1945)Holocaust survivors

About this book

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, 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 contempible. 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

Publication Details

Publisher: Abacus
Published: 1947
Pages: 398
ISBN: 9780349100135
Language: en

About Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi (Turin, 31 July 1919- 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. He graduated in Chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941 and two years later joined the anti-fascist resistance. He was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked as a slave in an industrial plant. After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and after an odyssey through several Eastern European countries, he returned to Turin and published his first account of the extermination camps, *Se questo è un uomo* (*If This Is a Man* / US: *The Reawakening*). His later biographical writings *La tregua* (*The Truce*, 1963) and *I sommersi e i salvati* (*The Drowned and the Saved*, 1986) are reflections on the experience of horror. His other works include *Il sistema periodico* (*The Periodic Table*), *Se non ora, quando?* (*If Not Now, When?*), *Storie naturali* (as Damiano Malabaila), *La chiave a stella* (*The Wrench*, 1978), *Lilit e altri racconti* (1978), *La ricerca delle radici* (*The Search for Roots*, 1981), and *L' ultimo Natale di guerra* (1984).