“What can be learned about the human being and about the history of Europe in the 20th century in the three volumes of Primo Levi’s great memorial trilogy is terrible and also instructive, and honestly I don’t believe it is possible to have a full political awareness without having read them, nor an idea of literature that does not include the example of that way of writing.” Antonio Muñoz Molina

If This Is a Man, the book that inaugurates the trilogy Primo Levi dedicated to the Nazi extermination camps, arose in the author’s imagination during the days of horror in Auschwitz, when the prisoners’ main concern was that, if they survived, no one would believe the atrocity of the lived experience. The concentration and extermination camps, more than being guarded by barbed wire and guards, were protected by their own monstrosity, which made them inconceivable. It is the sobriety of Primo Levi’s testimony, a victim who does not scream but who pulls the scream from the throat of his reader, that restores the horror to its reality and makes it intelligible as a sinister warning sign. A moving book by a man with an indestructible faith in reason.