Book Review: If This Is A Man

A little late with this, the book club choice for January: Primo Levi's "If This Is A Man." Strictly speaking, two books in one, as it includes "The Truce" in the second half, but I didn't read that. To be honest, I'd had enough after the first couple of chapters and couldn't face another entire book of the same, no matter how short.

From what others said, I may have peaked too soon. The second book is supposed to have a jollier aspect than the first, but as far as I'm concerned it's no great loss. Let's face it, the second could hardly be more dour and depressing than the first, which is a recounting of Levi's time in Auschwitz in painful detail. Literally painful - he enumerates his sores, and beatings, and hunger, and cold.

I think this is probably a book that everyone in the "civilised" world should read, but that doesn't mean I think they'd enjoy reading it. I didn't. I wanted it to be over. And I felt guilty wanting that. Countless reviews bang on about Levi's beautifully crafted prose, and yes, it's true, the book is astonishingly well written. But to me that didn't help. The subject matter is still what it is, and the more illuminating it is, the more depressing.

Among all the horrors that Levi describes, what stood out for me is that no matter how much privilege, rank, and power are stripped away from men, even when they are stood naked in the mud and rain with nothing to their name but a few dirty rags of clothing and a spoon with which to eat their daily ration of foul soup, when even that very name is removed and they are referred to only as a number, even then men will find a way of imposing hierarchy to differentiate themselves from their fellows. To subjugate some, thereby improving one's chances of survival. To defer to others, for the same reason. Even when survival means nothing more than the chance to stand naked and freezing in the snow for another day, men - humans, I should perhaps say rather - will still do whatever it takes. Because the alternative is, for them, too frightening to contemplate.

That's what stood out, from his writing. But there was another aspect to reading this book. The way it makes you think about yourself. How would I react, I wondered? Would I be one of the ones prepared to do anything, say anything, eat anything, to survive? Or would I give up, and play the part of one of those Levi so eloquently describes, who wander around for weeks, sometimes months, with dead eyes, waiting for their body to catch up with what has already happened to their spirit?