Se questo è un uomo Reading Order

Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man, 1947) by Primo Levi is one of the foundational works of Holocaust literature — a chemist's precise, unillusioned account of his year in Auschwitz-Monowitz from February 1944 to January 1945. Levi was arrested in December 1943 as a member of an Italian partisan group in the Valle d'Aosta, deported to Auschwitz in February 1944 as an Italian Jew, and survived because his chemistry training qualified him for work in the Buna synthetic rubber factory's chemical laboratory — indoor work that kept him alive through the Polish winter. He was among the prisoners left behind when the Germans evacuated Auschwitz before the Soviet advance; the Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945. Levi began writing the book almost immediately after liberation, completing a draft by December 1945. The book was rejected by Einaudi and other publishers before appearing in 1947 in a small edition from a Turin publisher. It went out of print and was not rediscovered until Einaudi published it in 1958, after which it became the classic it is now recognized as. Levi's method is precisely that of the chemist: precise observation, taxonomic exactitude, refusal of sentimentality or self-pity. The chapter 'The Canto of Ulysses' — in which Levi tries to remember and recite the Inferno to a young French prisoner while walking to collect the day's soup — is among the most celebrated passages in all of twentieth-century literature.