Extenuating Circumstances 
Adam Phillips
- Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning by Paul Steinberg, translated by Linda Coverdale
In Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz If this is a man – written, he says, not ‘to formulate new accusations . . . rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind’ – there is an account that is a kind of accusation of a man Levi calls Henri. There are several character sketches of his fellow inmates, but the two pages on Henri are unusually troubled. Levi tends to know what he thinks of the people he remembers, but something about Henri makes him hesitate: ‘I know that Henri is living today,’ he concludes. ‘I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again.’ For some reason Levi didn’t want to know the next bit of the story: what happened to Henri, or perhaps to people like Henri.
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Adam Phillips’s Intimacies, written with Leo Bersani, is out now. A book on the pleasures of kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is due in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
Remember me · Bret Easton Ellis
What You Really Want · Edmund White
Bored with Sex? · Nasty Turns
No reason for not asking · Empson’s War on God
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