L'espèce humaine

First edition, no deluxe copies were printed; this copy retains the original wrappers.

A small loss at the head of the rear wrapper, otherwise a rare and pleasing copy.

"There are not several human races, there is only one human race. It's because we're men like them that the SS will finally prove powerless before us."

This fundamental work on the experience of the Nazi camps was the third and final publication of the short-lived publishing house founded by Marguerite Duras and Robert Antelme, her husband from 1940 to 1946.
Overlooked at the time of this first, confidential printing, with only a handful of copies sold, it was reissued the following year under new wrappers by Robert Marin; the work nonetheless suffered from competition with the many accounts on the subject published immediately after the war. Yet, as F. Lebelley recounts: "At a time when narratives abound, the particular power of this book, of an originary austerity, strikes one like a founding text. A writer's book, too, one that Duras acknowledges as having taken "the open sea of literature." Robert Antelme would never write another. Despite the praise and the honors, L'Espèce humaine would remain the singular work of a lifetime." (in Duras, ou le poids d'une plume.)

Thanks to the intervention of Albert Camus, the book was reissued ten years later, in 1957, by Gallimard, reaching a wider readership.
From then on, this book took its place in literary history as one of the most important texts confronting the painful but necessary reflection on the concentration camps and the human condition. It was in its wake that writers such as his friend Jorge Semprún were able to begin a new approach to the near-impossible task of writing about the camps.
As early as 1947, Antelme stated in his foreword: "we had only just returned, with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been. As of those first days, however, we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience [...] How were we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got to the state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so it was impossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable." (The human race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler). 

A rare and important copy, rarely found in national and international libraries.