The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved was written towards the end of Primo Levi's life, and unlike his earlier memoirs If This is a Man and The Truce, it doesn't explicitly narrate his experiences in Auschwitz and after liberation. Instead, it's a collection of meditative essays, attempts to get to the bottom of the world of the concentration camps. Although, as Levi famously writes, the survivors can never know the whole truth (that is the preserve only of the lost, the drowned), the penetration of his insight is staggering: whether writing about the language of the camps or the complex moral grey area of collaboration with camp authorities, he approaches his subject with clarity, passion, and unstinting moral commitment.