Sometimes I’ll read it as a hopeful story and stop the chapter before they get arrested.

If you read it that way it starts as grumpy guy in totalitarian hellscape who hates himself and ends with him having found someone, being enlightened by resistance, and having a will to live.

(Of course the point isn’t to stop there. But sometimes I feel like reading the book again without being too gloomy.)

I think it also helps to understand the context of him writing the book. Specifically his experience as a libertarian socialist in revolutionary Catalonia and the oppression (incl executions and imprisonment) he and his comrades faced from Stalinist factions who treated the anarchists as threats to their power.