Weightless Books

Almost eighty years have passed since Jean Améry was taken by the gestapo and interrogated at Fort Breendonk in Antwerp, and yet the world today may not seem much different. In Emory Klann’s new translation, Améry’s experience and insight into the human condition under duress captures the horrors of the Nazi while also sculpting the process of perseverance and stoic strength. Torture is both a documentation of the act as witnessed by Améry, but also an accounting of the anguish and realizations of the mind in a physically and emotionally oppressed body. “With its lines about how the tortured person irrevocably loses an elemental ‘trust in the world,’ and how easily torture effaces mental capacities that take years and great effort to build up, reducing people to masses of squealing flesh, Améry’s essay ‘Torture’ can read like a suicide note. And yet the precision of its language, brilliantly on display in Emory Klann’s new translation, has provided generations of readers with solace, even uplift.” —Paul Reitter, from the Introduction

Posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2022 at 12:00 am.