I’ve stolen this book from my granddad’s
bookshelf. It was a gift for him by my mom some 20 years ago. His memory is
really rather wobbly now, I don’t think he’ll realize it’s gone (or, sadly,
that he’s ever read it).
I’ve read it because my mother – rightfully, as
is sometimes the case! – scolded me for saying that often Levi’s writing is (understandably,
obviously) quite humourless. I stand by what I said in relation to books about
the holocaust. But La Tregua is more
than that. It’s about the long journey home, about the light at the end of the tunnel,
about the desire to live. Also, La Tregua
was written in the early 1960s, 15 years after Se Questo E’ un Uomo, and I’m sure that this played an important
role in the way in which Levi recalled his turbulent days in 1945 and 1946.
Levi’s self-mocking when describing his lack of
street smarts is endearing, the plethora of secondary characters with very
often stereotypical national quirks is extremely funny (at times actually hilarious),
and the never-ending road back to Turin is of such an epic and heroic kind that
I am sure McCarthy would love to have written La Tregua. And, clearly, the anecdotes that Levi magisterially
recalls in La Tregua are of the kind
which can only be lived and told by the chosen people.
