I've been working through Primo Levi's
Se questo è un uomo for the sake of practicing my Italian but since it's been going very slowly, I zipped through the English translation (
If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz) because I couldn't wait to find out how things went.
Then I decided to binge read Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in Jerusalem on the sixteen-hour plane ride from India to the US. Fuck me, it's depressing. I don't understand though why so many people were down on Arendt for this book. The idea of an ordinary individual following through with a horrific genocidal program because of personal ambition, elevation of obedience as the highest virtue, and a shattering incapacity for original speech and thought seems to me to be both more horrifying and more compelling than the notion that he must have been a racist, psychopathic monster.
Then again, it's not my struggle and not my pain so perhaps I am not in the position to make judgments on the issue.