|
* * *
Primo Levi is known to English readers mainly for his writings on the Holocaust—Survival in Auschwitz and The Truce—and for the autobiographical Periodic Table. Yet he was a prolific writer of stories and essays; he had, he once recalled, been writing poems and stories even before he was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. His first efforts when he returned to Turin included both poems and stories, in addition to what he was writing about his experiences in the concentration camp; and he continued to write stories until his sudden death, in 1987.This new book of stories, the first untranslated fiction of Levi’s to be published in the United States since 1990,* is intended to introduce readers to a Primo Levi who may be somewhat unfamiliar to them.
The earliest story in A Tranquil Star,“The Death of Marinese,” dates from 1949, when Levi was virtually unknown as a writer, and was first published in Il Ponte, a liberal-socialist journal based in Florence that had published a chapter of Survival in Auschwitz two years earlier. It tells of a captured partisan who, as he is being transported in a truck to prison, decides to set off the grenade in the belt of a German soldier guarding him. In the space of a few pages, Levi re-creates the suffocating sensation of capture, the feverish yet clear-headed state of mind, the sharp hatred of the Germans, the weary intensity of despair that lead to Marinese’s act.
The story may have been based on an account that Levi had heard, but there is at least a grain of personal experience. Levi had joined a partisan group in the fall of 1943 and was almost immediately captured himself; on the bus that was transporting him to prison, he writes, in the chapter “Gold,” in The Periodic Table, he had the thought of pulling the cord on the grenade of a German soldier with his back turned to him, but—unlike Marinese—he didn’t have the courage.
“Bear Meat,”the second story here, was published in 1961 in Il Mondo, a political and literary journal based in Rome. It, too, is a story about foolhardiness and courage, but utterly different from “Marinese,” in its expansive storytelling and cast of characters, its complex format (the double narrator and the story within a story), mountain setting, and overtly moralistic tone. The mountains and mountain climbing were important to Levi, and the story recapitulates some of his own experiences. In a 1984 interview he said, “I began going up into the mountains when I was thirteen or fourteen. In my family there was a tradition of seeing the mountains as a source of strength. . . . Not mountaineering as such, no climbing rockfaces. . . .You just went up into the mountains.” Levi did not write other stories of this type, nor did he ever include this one in a collection, perhaps because of its singularity; however, the second part, the story of the character called Carlo, appears—with the character’s actual name—in the “Iron” chapter of The Periodic Table.
“Censorship in Bitinia” was published the same year as “Bear Meat,” in the same journal (and then in Levi’s first Italian collection, Storie Naturali). Short and satirical, without characters, it makes a sharp contrast to “Bear Meat.”Bitinia (a made-up country), Levi tells us, has a problem finding qualified people to do the work of censorship; one difficulty is the job hazards, which may include “various sensory system troubles,” such as “exaggerated reactions to certain colors or flavors, which regularly develop, after remissions and relapses, into serious psychological anomalies and perversions.” Levi describes the various solutions, keeping the slightly detached, almost deadpan tone of the reporter.The story seems to have been inspired by the Christian Democratic politician Mario Scelba, who served as Interior Minister and Prime Minister in the nineteen-fifties and was known for his rigid suppression of dissent, especially on the left. The two remaining stories in Part I of this volume,“Knall” and “In the Park,”were written between 1968 and 1970, and published in the Italian volume Vizio di Forma.
In a letter to his publisher about the stories he was writing in the sixties, Levi says that he is trying to give form to a perception he has of “an unraveling in the world, a breach, large or small, a ‘defect of form’ that annihilates one or another aspect of our civilization or our moral universe.” In the story “Knall,” for example, he invents “a small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier,” which comes “solid-colored, gray or red” or “in wrappers printed with revoltingly tasteless little scenes and comic figures.”
The purpose of this harmless-sounding device (its popularity is compared to that of the hula hoop), presented as a sort of toy, is, it turns out, to kill.Yet the tone remains light and conversational, and the details are from ordinary life; for example, the idea that displaying a knall on one’s person is “de rigueur” in certain circles, or that its use has spread without any help from the media. “In the Park,” on the other hand, creates an entire fantasy world, a National Park of literary characters. Like Dante and Virgil in Purgatory, and Aeneas guided by the Sybil through the Underworld,Antonio, a new arrival, and James, his guide, tour the park and its inhabitants, who include the creations of many of Levi’s favorite authors: François Villon, Conrad, Melville, Rabelais, the Milanese dialogue poet Carlo Porta, and, of course, Dante. It is an eclectic crowd, reflecting the broad range of Levi’s interests. As a child he was often ill and had to be tutored at home; with that, and his father’s vast library, he was able to read far beyond the narrow classical curriculum followed by the schools. (In school, in fact, he was less interested in literature than in science.) Levi’s descriptions of the various characters of “In the Park” (“all cordial people, or at least varied and interesting”) give him an opportunity for brief, often oblique, and humorous commentaries on literature and on human behavior in general. In contrast to Part I, most of the stories in Part II were written in the late seventies and the eighties, after Levi had retired as director of the SIVA paint factory to become a fulltime writer; before that, he had been able to write only at night and on weekends. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in 1986, “I worked in a factory for nearly thirty years and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing —to direct a factory involves many other matters, far from chemistry. . . . Consequently I truly felt that I had been ‘born again’ when I reached retirement age and could resign.”
That was in 1975, the year The Periodic Table came out, cementing Levi’s reputation in Italy. In the next decade, he published The Wrench (1978), If Not Now,When? (1982), Other People’s Trades (1985), and The Drowned and the Saved (1986), and became a regular contributor to the Turin newspaper La Stampa, for which he had written sporadically since 1959. It was not until 1984, when The Periodic Table appeared in English, that Levi gained recognition, and acclaim, in America. Seven of the twelve stories in this section are from Lilith, a three-part collection published in Italy in 1981.The first part of Lilith—which appeared in English as Moments of Reprieve—is entitled Passato Prossimo (Simple Past), and the stories take up the theme of the Holocaust. The two other parts, which have not appeared before in English, are entitled Futuro Anteriore (Future Perfect) and Presente Indicativo (Present Indicative).The stories taken from Future Perfect—“A Tranquil Star,” “The Gladiators,” “The Fugitive,” and “The Magic Paint”—are in the gentle fantasy vein. Those from Present Indicative—“The Sorcerers,” “The Molecule’s Defiance,” and “The Girl in the Book”—are, as the rubric indicates, closer to everyday life, and, Levi wrote,“indicative of our time.” In “The Gladiators,” published in the magazine L’Automobile, modern-day gladiator-athletes enter the stadium to go up against cars.“The Magic Paint,” which appeared in Il Mondo in 1973, is about the search for a paint that wards off evil. In just a few pages we learn how a paint sample is analyzed, and the dangers of trying to escape our fate, moving from the practical analysis to the scientific explication of the properties of the element tantalum and finally to the disastrous experiment with the glasses of the narrator’s old friend. “The Molecule’s Defiance,” like “The Magic Paint,” takes place in a paint factory, but, unlike “The Magic Paint,” with its layer of the supernatural, sticks to real life, to the science of making a varnish and what can go wrong in the process.
Of the five other stories in Part II, four—“One Night,” “Bureau of Vital Statistics,”“Buffet Dinner,” and “Fra Diavolo on the Po”—were first published in La Stampa and were not collected in Levi’s lifetime, while the fifth, “The TV Fans from Delta Cep.,” was first published in L’Astronomia. “One Night” is perhaps the eeriest of the stories here, the only one that lacks an underlying humor and seems to speak of pure destruction. It’s not specificaly about the Holocaust, yet one can almost not help but think of the death camps as the story opens with a train in a landscape that may seem beautiful but that turns out to harbor devastation. Levi often wrote about animals. He was interested in biology before he decided to become a chemist; when he was fifteen, his father gave him a microscope and his first explorations were of the insect and animal world.This passion for detail can be seen in his writing about animals, and he is a close observer of both physical characteristics and behavior. In “Buffet Dinner” the reader is not told right away that the protagonist is a kangaroo; in fact, although a tail is mentioned on the first page, and other facts accumulate, the species isn’t named until more than halfway through the story. In “The TV Fans from Delta Cep.” is also a creature, of a sort, but an invented one. (The story is presented as a transmission from the inhabitants of a distant planet to Piero Bianucci, the editor of La Stampa and the host of a popular science show on TV; this transmission has been “translated by Primo Levi.”) The final story in this volume, the highly lyrical “A Tranquil Star” (published not only in La Stampa but in the journal L’Astronomia), begins with a discussion of language and the difficulties, and the importance, of being rigorous, scrupulous, and exacting with words (“how many times as high as a high tower is a very high tower?”). Levi’s ability to do so is one of the harrowing strengths of his writing about the Holocaust, and the language of his stories, whatever the subject—the mountain landscape, the invented knall, the process of making a paint—is similarly compelling, if on a smaller scale. The description of how atoms bond in “The Molecule’s Defiance” is a marvel of simple language and complex science.While Levi sometimes does use a technical or scientific term—the “adiabatic observatory” (“Delta Cep.”); “gelatinization” and “premature polymerization” (“The Molecule’s Defiance”); “diplopia” (“Censorship in Bitinia”)—it is always as part of the careful construction of the moment that the particular story presents. “I hope that each story properly fulfills its task, which is only that of condensing into a few pages, and conveying to the reader, a particular memory, a state of mind, or even just a thought. Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad.” Levi was here speaking of the stories in Lilith, but certainly what he says could apply to all his short pieces. “In my opinion,” he wrote,“a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is. I insist on this word,‘ambiguous’: a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story, therefore everything is valid, rationality is valid, the sciencefiction world is valid, and even the sensation of dreams is valid.”
For the reader who knows Levi’s other works, these stories are a treasure; for the reader who does not, or who knows only the Holocaust works, they are a revelation, a chance to spend time with a precise, imaginative, and surprising companion.
Ann Goldstein
.
|
PenguinClassics RSS
