If This Is a Man • The Truce
La Tregua is an extraordinary book. Levi wrote his first book, If This Is a Man, immediately after being repatriated to Italy after his time in Auschwitz, so that book was much more vivid. He wrote this book 20 years later and it is much more considered and, in many ways, more carefully constructed. The events occur after the liberation of Auschwitz and the book is almost a picaresque novel. Initially the prisoners are kept in the camp, but they are fed and more or less looked after. It’s a very curious slant on the whole period and is actually very funny in places. Later he undergoes this extraordinary odyssey around central Europe, being shifted here and there by the Russians over a period of about almost a year. [source]
Levi regains reason, by treating his experience in Auschwitz as something that is subject to rational analysis. [source]
Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and he was arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance towards the end of the war, after Germany had occupied Italy. He was deported to Auschwitz. He survived and then he wrote a book about his experiences there. This really is a book that everybody should be made to read because he very sensitively describes what people become in a concentration camp. [source]
