This month on the reading group, we are going to look at If This Is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi, who would have been 100 on 31 July. These are two books that you must read, and not in the usual sense that literary critics may urge you to read something. Both are works of art and remarkable for the calm clarity of Levi’s authorial voice, but there is more at stake. These are books that tell us things we must know. They give us warnings that we must heed. They are, perhaps more than anything we have read here, essential.
If This Is a Man was first published in Italy in 1947, two years after Levi returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp so malnourished and ravaged by disease that he had difficulty making himself recognised by his family. It tells of his capture in 1944, his transportation, the year he spent inside the camp, the horrors he was made to witness, the suffering he had to endure and the depths to which humanity can fall. I won’t pretend that it’s anything other than horrifying. It isn’t easy. You might not get through it without tears. But Stuart Woolf’s translation at least makes the prose easy to assimilate. As the Observer stated when the book was first published in the UK in 1960: “It is an obscene and monstrous story, quietly and beautifully told.” Levi’s intelligent gentle humanity, combined with his moral stamina and precise powers of observation also offer a kind of compensation. It may be a duty to read this book, but it is not one you will regret.
The Truce, meanwhile, takes us out of the hell described in If This Is a Man and tells of Levi’s journey home after liberation. It too contains appalling tragedy – but also feels like a gift, especially after what has gone before. It provides a faint rekindling of hope and a powerful sense of renewal.
Sadly there is no need to explain the urgency of reading these books now, although even if we weren’t in our current political situation, they would remain vital. I hope you will join me in trying to honour Levi, who died in 1987, on his centenary.
By way of further encouragement and thanks to Little, Brown, we have five copies of If This Is a Man and The Truce in one volume to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email the lovely folk on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username.
