The Reawakening

This is just one of the many brilliant writings of Primo Levi but it tells a tale of Holocaust survival that is often overlooked. Most narratives seem to end at liberation and this one gives us a detailed view of what happened afterwards. This is the book that the movie "The Truce" (which is also the title of this book in Italy)is loosely based on. I don't think the movie did the book justice at all and so I would especially recommend this book to anyone that has seen the movie. Like all of Levi's works it is written in a sparse yet fantastic style and it really is a great follow up to "Survival In Auschwitz".

Like Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table, The Reawakening is populated with Levi's brilliant language and fascination with character. In Survival, Table and Reawakening, Levi is careful not to force facts into a satisfyingly explanatory story. The Reawakening is a picaresque without the moral center. Levi travels home through a carnival world, a Europe simultaneously stunned and ecstatic, a landscape of displaced characters, Greek villagers in Polish refugee camps, complicit Germans sitting down to the first course of horrific recent history and guilt, cadaverous lager inmates staggering into a world forever altered. It is a world populated with impresarios, rakes, opportunists, suicides, daredevils and rubes. But, more than anything else, The Reawakening is brimming with life; Levi makes his way home eyes forward. I found myself thinking of two other books while reading Reawakening--Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. Like Kosinski, Levi reminds us that much of rural eastern Europe was cruel and primitive before the Nazi's made a virtue of these qualities. And, like Wolfe's Gant family, the characters in Levi's account are often exuberant to the point of mania. I think that Levi is one of the great writers and thinkers of our time. In this way, I'm not a reliable critic. Reviewing The Reawakening is akin to reviewing Hamlet for me.

An really good book. I read it immediately after his previous book (Survival in Auschwitz : The Nazi Assault on Humanity) and where the first one is extremely sad and depressing this second one is an incredible insight into the mixture of characters that Levi encounters on his way back from Auschwitz. Although set in a completely ruined Eastern Europe I found the book positive and intriguing to read. His friends the Greek, Cesare, il Moro etc. are all amazing characters to read about and his whole journey through the Russian bureaucracy is just as fascinating to experience as well.

Primo Levi again shows the magic of his writing in this tale of the purgatory he experienced after his liberation from Auschwitz. His memories of the people he meets along the way and the way he describes them are amazing, whether you hate them or love them they all seem ... human, something one couldn't exactly tell from his account of the camp itself. Truly a brilliant book.