My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an impossibly eloquent thing. It is the sort of book that you write a thousand sentences for and realise that none of them will ever be enough. So here, let us try and find the enough to describe this. If This Is A Man documents the time that the author, Primo Levi, was imprisoned in Auschwitz. He writes cleanly, straightforwardly, about the horrific and that gives this text a remarkable power. There’s no dressing, no coyness. Levi recounts the truth of his experience and gives it to you without delicacy: this is how it was and you need to know and somehow you need to be able to understand the incomprehensible.

It is difficult to read, horrible at points, and yet so very human. The good, the bad, the contemptible, the horrific. And at the middle of that, the author considering how the world has contorted to allow such horrors and determinedly documenting the baseness of those who are involved. It is the little things which stick: the determined, systematic stripping of humanity from others. The taking of the shoes for some reason stuck with me. The precision of the act. The disgusting detail of it.

It is a profoundly human book. Levi is a brilliant writer. His text holds a sense of enormous clarity about itself. A composure. It’s craft, really. Some of the finest sort. A lesson in writing, a lesson in living. A lesson in the knots and twists of the world, how they can tie themselves tightly about you, how other people can hold the string, and about how you, yourself, can persist despite all of it. It is awe-inspiring. It really, really is.

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