If This Is a Man and The Truce

by Primo Levi

Paperback, 400 pages

Italian language

Published Jan. 1, 1987 by Abacus.

ISBN:: 978-0-349-10013-5

(11 reviews)

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

6 editions

mictter reviewed La tregua by Primo Levi

El largo camino a casa

5 stars

Continuación del célebre “Si esto es un hombre”, relatando el accidentado trayecto desde la liberación del campo de Auschwitz hasta que por fin llega a casa en Turín.

Mucho menos amargo que el libro anterior, aunque sin llegar a ser demasiado optimista, es casi una novela picaresca, un compendio de gentes muy ocupadas en sobrevivir tras todo lo que han pasado. Una lectura agradable en la que queda bien clara la simpatía del autor por los rusos y su amor por el caos y la desidia en las cosas poco importantes, que son casi todas las burocráticas.