If This Is a Man

£9.99

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a 20th-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. Philip Roth called him a ‘magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known.’

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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

Additional information

Weight 0.36 kg
Dimensions 19.6 × 12.8 × 3.6 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

400

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

940.547243092 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K