A calm rejection of consolation …

… Howard Jacobson: rereading If This Is a Man by Primo Levi | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… if we approach If This is a Man expecting a historical investigation of the rise of Nazism and the potency of its appeal to the German people, or an inquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we ask both too much and too little of it. Levi is neither historian nor metaphysician. As a matter of honour, no less than as a matter of writerly decency – perhaps as a mark of respect to mankind – he refuses grandiose philosophising or theology.