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PRIMO LEVI
The good German
On
the 20th anniversary of Primo Levi's death, Ian Thomson explores the writer's
long correspondence with 'Mrs Hety S' - his intellectual soul mate, confidante
and the vital inspiration for many of his books
Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian
On April 11 1987, more than 40 years after his rescue from Auschwitz, Primo Levi fell to his death in the block of flats where he lived in northern Italy. The authorities pronounced a verdict of suicide. Levi had pitched himself three flights down the stairwell. Not since Pasolini was found murdered on the outskirts of Rome had there been such clamorous coverage in Italy of a writer's death. "Italy mourns the maestro", ran the front-page headlines.
Twenty years on, it remains hard for friends and admirers of Levi to reconcile the calm reasonableness of his literary intention - to furnish "documentation for a quiet study of the human mind" - with so violent a death. Levi's chronicle of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man (1948), remains a marvel of luminous precision and poise. Yet there are collective condemnations, coloured by the author's rage, of the German people. At one point the Germans are addressed aggressively in the vocative - "You, Germans, you have succeeded." Any German who had shown Levi a scintilla of humanity in the camp - and there were several - is pointedly omitted. Only in later life would Levi investigate the exceptions that defied the stereotype: the good German, the kind Kapo.
A complicated, difficult man, Levi was noted for his determination to keep secret what he wished to keep secret. He wrote almost nothing of his immediate family, and other people are often alluded to in his books by their initials only. His late essay collection, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), typically contains many elisions and concealments. In one chapter Levi refers to a German admirer of his as "Mrs Hety S". A number of other survivors and even former Nazis were in correspondence with "Mrs Hety S"; her letters were treasured (and carefully collected) by all who received them, including Albert Speer, the Nazis' armaments minister. But who was "Mrs Hety S"? We learned that her former husband had been a chemist for IG Farben, the German chemical giant that operated out of Auschwitz and other camps, and for which Levi was forced to work; but more than that, Levi does not say. In the hope of identifying the mystery correspondent for my biography of Levi, I placed advertisements in a number of European journals and newspapers, asking for information. The response was good. A film-maker in Holland telephoned to say that the daughter of "Mrs Hety S" had given her a copy of the entire correspondence.
Hety Schmitt-Maas - the real-life "Mrs Hety S" - was a Catholic divorcee, born in 1918 to an exemplary anti-Nazi family: when Hitler came to power, her liberal-minded father lost his teaching post. Following his stern example, Hety refused to join the Nazi BDM (Association of German Girls) and was expelled from school. Her family's Jewish doctor had committed suicide in despair at the Goebbels persecution. When, in 1959, she settled in Wiesbaden to work for the local ministry of culture, she began to investigate what she called the entire "Komplex" of Nazism.
She corresponded with Levi for almost 20 years, writing 57 letters to his 49 to her. She was vitally important to him as a writer and sections of Levi's books could not have been written without her; she put him in touch with writer friends and other contacts in Germany, creating an ever-expanding network of correspondence among them. In this way she hoped to counteract Himmler's cynical pledge that the destruction of European Jewry would be an "unwritten page of glory". Hety's great ambition, she told Levi, was to "understand" the Nazi past.
Written in both German and Italian, the Primo Levi-Hety Schmitt-Maas correspondence runs to 300 typewritten pages. Levi's other biographers had not seen it. I contacted Hety's daughter, Marianne Felsche, for permission to use the material. To my surprise she spoke to me of a "very difficult and obsessive woman", who would bring books on Treblinka and Auschwitz to children's tea parties in case she got bored. "Some things were too important for my mother, to dance attendance on a nursery tea," she told me crossly. I was welcome to the correspondence; Felsche even offered to send me a copy of her mother's unpublished diary, which chronicled Levi's depressions and domestic unhappiness.
Hety sent her first letter to Levi on October 18 1966: "You will never really be able to understand the Germans, we Germans do not understand ourselves." Hety had written to Levi care of his publishers in Turin; If This Is a Man, she told him, was "Pflichtlektüre" - "compulsory reading" - and she was determined to have it read in German schools.
Levi understood at once that his unseen correspondent was a decent, ordinary German with moral struggles of her own. Many Germans, in an excessive self-flagellation, had turned national guilt into a virtue. But Hety was not like that. Over the coming months she was able to provide Levi with an epistolary lifeline out of the marital and parental tensions of his difficult home life, and became his soul mate. So her opening letter marked a new epoch for Levi - the start of an extraordinary 17-year correspondence - though he little suspected it when he replied a month later on November 5 1966: "Yes, even today I find it hard to understand the Germans. If This Is a Man did have the response in Germany I had hoped for, but I do believe it came from the very Germans who least needed to read the book. The innocent, not the guilty, repent: it's absurd - it's so human."
Levi's attitude to postwar Germany, until now mistrustful, changed as he learned of Hety's extraordinary background. Hety's second letter to Levi began: "Sehr geehrter [Most Honoured - a very formal greeting] Herr Dr Levi", and she seemed to want to unburden herself of guilt. "The only consolation for those of us who were on the other side of the barbed-wire fence is to know that people like you were able to start new lives after all." Hety's restless mission to understand Germany had been provoked, she said, by her husband's tacit compliance with IG Farben and the Hitler government; in his impotent silence Hety thought she could detect many of postwar Germany's problems.
With Hety's help, Levi was now able to track down his former IG Farben overseer at Auschwitz, Dr Ferdinand Meyer, an inadequate rather than infamous man who had issued Levi with leather shoes and shown him other kindnesses in the camp. Levi could hardly see Meyer as representative of the Auschwitz butchers; yet in his memoir The Periodic Table (1975) he portrayed Meyer as the slyly mendacious former Nazi "Dr Lothar Müller", who apparently felt no shame for his past. Hety, shocked by the "unkind" transformation of Meyer, suspected literary untruthfulness in Levi. As the years passed, Hety's letters to Levi became five, six, sometimes 10 pages long, and contained personal disclosures about family and private life. Furious rows had erupted between Hety and her daughter, who did not want to listen to her talk of Nazism. Undeterred, Hety sent Levi German books and newspaper clippings on the subject; as the material began to pile up unread at his end, Levi resolved to make his letters more skimpy ("Don't be cross"); but still this did not abate Hety's postal onslaught. It was time they met.
I n September 1968, while touring Germany, Levi called on Hety at her home in Wiesbaden. They had not exchanged photographs during their correspondence, and Levi had expected Hety to look rather intense. Instead, he found an unprepossessing, pale-faced woman in glasses; the real surprise was Primo Levi. From his author photograph on the German edition of If This Is a Man, Hety was sure he would look "tormented" or "worn down"; in reality she found him "relaxed" and even "blooming". More, he seemed to emanate "Strahlkraft" - a kind of charisma.
Three years later, however, when they met again, Hety thought him quite transformed. The Levi she encountered in Turin in 1971 was a fear-ridden and nervous man, whose German revealingly dried up as soon as his wife Lucia came into the room. Levi's "Sprachprobleme" ("speech-problems"), as Hety referred to them in her diary, may have been connected to the guilt he felt at betraying his marital problems to her in the correspondence. Not for the first time, Levi was depressed - and his depressive inarticulacy was striking. Afterwards Hety watched in embarrassment as Levi's wife "shrunk" from view across the restaurant table until she was "quite absent": Lucia spoke no German, and Levi soon gave up on his attempts to include her in the conversation.
On November 12 1975, hoping to fathom a darker side of post-Hitler Germany, Hety visited the apparently repentant Albert Speer in his home at Heidelberg. Though she was under no illusions about this Faustian figure, she wanted to commend Levi's books to him. Later she wrote excitedly to Levi that she had left a copy of If This Is a Man with the former Nazi. "I said he absolutely must read it!" Levi was bewildered: as Hitler's arms minister, Speer had been the principal Nazi exploiter of slave and Jewish labour. To Hety he wrote: "It looks to me like an odd dream that this book of mine, born in the mud of Auschwitz, is going to sail upstream - to one of the very Almighties of that time!" But he was unsettled by Hety's cosy audience with the enemy. "Explain to me: what moved you to interview Speer? Curiosity? Sense of duty? Mission?"
Did Speer read If This Is a Man? On New Year's Day 1976 Speer wrote to Hety that he had "skimmed" part of the book. Two weeks later, on January 16, he added that he did not wish to "disturb" Levi by reading his Auschwitz testimony. To this puzzling utterance Hety replied a full six months later: "I find it a great pity that you have not yet read If This Is a Man; if you did, the insanity and diabolicism of the Nazi system would finally be made clear to you." Speer never replied: Hety's last letter to him, dated May 5 1981, went unanswered. Four months later, Speer died of a cerebral haemorrhage in a London hospital. "I would have had some problems with writing to this ambiguous fellow," Levi told me when I interviewed him in 1986.
In 1983, suddenly and unexpectedly, Hety Schmitt-Maas died. She was 65. Her admiration for Levi (not always reciprocated) had been extraordinary, and Levi was always fond of her; she had helped to fill a void in Levi's life and gave him access to the intellectual ferment of postwar Germany. Her death precipitated another depressive episode for Levi. Part of his moral support had gone: everything about the friends' mutual solicitude, affection and trust stemmed from their shared hatred of Nazism and their need to understand Hitler's war against the Jews. For as long as he was in contact with Germans like Hety Schmitt-Maas, Primo Levi could believe that a Fourth Reich would be impossible; she had become his idea of the good German.
Ian Thomson's biography, Primo Levi, is published by Vintage
April 18, 2007
A writer burdened by history
Ian Thomson reviews A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi tr by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
With Primo Levi's suicide in Turin in April 1987, European literature was deprived of one of its most refined and civilised voices. Twenty years on, it remains hard for friends and admirers of Levi to reconcile the calm reasonableness of his writing with so violent a death. If This is a Man (1948), his first-hand account of survival in Auschwitz, remains a masterpiece of precision and restraint. Some survivors were secretly disgusted, and saw Levi's 'self-murder' as a betrayal. Others were shocked less by the death than by the method he chose to die. As a trained chemist, Levi could have ended his life discreetly, like Arthur Koestler, with a drug. Instead he pitched himself down the stairwell of the apartment block where he lived in northern Italy.
Over the years, moral outrage has been expressed at Levi's death. In The New Yorker it was even suggested that Levi had cheated his readers with a last and terrible act of denial. The belief remains as vulgar as it is short-sighted. Levi and his books are not one and the same. ('I'm hardly well-balanced', Levi said in one of his last interviews - a warning to his readers not to confuse the author with his books.) A difficult, complicated man, Levi went through long periods of depression.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Levi's death, A Tranquil Star gathers 17 of his short stories. Previously unpublished in English, they are a motley of science fantasy, satire, allegorical caprice and wartime reminiscence. Some of the stories - bagatelles, really - are able but undistinguished. In his darker moments Levi wondered if he would have become a writer at all, without the catalyst of Auschwitz. The camp had imparted a sense of urgency to his task of writing, and remained his great theme, the place where the writer in him was born.
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating collection, full of philosophic wit, pastiche and, at times, dark foreboding. For their whimsy and sly allegorical humour they borrow from Italo Calvino, yet ultimately they are Levi's own. And what gives them edge and distinction - lends them potency and originality - is the shadow cast by Auschwitz. 'One Night' opens with a cattle-train shunting an unnamed cargo across a chilly landscape. 'Censorship in Bitinia', an Orwellian allegory of the totalitarian state, first appeared in Levi's 1967 dystopian collection, Natural Histories, and considers man's dangerous misuse of technology.
As a chemist Levi understood better than most that the world's most destructive transformations (Zyklon B, anthrax, sarin) are born in the laboratory. Auschwitz itself, in Levi's scientific interpretation, was a giant laboratory experiment designed to transform the substance of mankind. Two fantasies here - 'Knall' and 'In The Park' - are taken from his bleakest story collection, A Stuctural Defect (1971), which flickers with newsreel images of race riots, B-28 jungle missions and piles of skeletal corpses. A quarter of a century after the end of Nazism it seemed that Levi was preparing for the final countdown - the third world war that had begun with the atomic flash over Hiroshima.
The title story, 'A Tranquil Star', laments the limitations of our language to describe the scientific phenomena of the planets or the invisible world of the atom. These, Levi believed, were far more resistant to our everyday language than the enormity of Auschwitz. Other stories reveal more private fears and insecurities. After If This is a Man Levi believed there could be no sequel, no second act: following his Auschwitz chronicle, what else could he possibly write? In 'The Fugitive' a poet tries (but fails) to escape the burden of his 'most beautiful poem', which has come to weigh on him like an albatross. Levi thought of himself as a writer first, and a testimone - or witness - second.
For 30 years Levi was the manager of a paint and varnish factory outside Turin. During the day his clothes smelled of vinegary acetic acid, or the burned toffee tang of phenol. Yet the distractions of factory work - card indexes, book-keeping - helped to keep depression at bay and provided Levi with material for fiction. 'The Magic Paint', a jocose fantasy, imagines an industrial lacquer which has the power to ward off the evil eye.
Other stories are influenced by Hemingway and the neo-realist films of the Italian Resistance by De Sica and Rossellini. 'The Death of Marinese' dates from 1949 when Levi was virtually unknown as a writer. With its triumphalist message of partisan revolt, it is a classic war story, gritty and suspenseful. For all that Levi wrote of other subjects, it was the war, and the moral and material ruins of post-Nazi Europe, that provided him with his most enduring subject matter. A Tranquil Star, a mixture of the funny and the sombre, is distinctly minor Primo Levi; yet it reminds us of what a marvellously varied writer was lost to the world that Easter weekend of April 1987.
Primo Levi collection an uneven mix
By Ilan Stavans
April 15, 2007
A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi
By Primo Levi, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, Alessandra Bastagli and
Jenny McPhee
Norton, 164 pages, $21.95
Primo Levi committed suicide 20 years ago, at age
68. Born in 1919 into a Sephardic family in Turin, Italy, his experience through
the Holocaust and beyond defined him. Time and again he wrote about it,
sometimes in the form of a straight-forward report on the conditions in
Auschwitz, other times in fictional form. He even wrote verse, as if he was
eager to prove Theodor Adorno wrong when he said that after the camps there is
no room for poetry.
Levi is best known for the memoirs "If This Is a Man" and its sequel, "The
Truce" (also known, respectively, as "Survival in Auschwitz" and "The
Reawakening"), which, along with Anne Frank's diary, Elie Wiesel's "Night" and
Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," form the
literary canon through which millions of people are exposed to the atrocities of
World War II.
Invariably, Levi's accounts were frighteningly precise, with the sort of
detachment one would need to overcome the extreme misery to which he was
subjected. But the act of writing didn't have therapeutic results for Levi. Or
if it did, the relief was temporary. He suffered from depression all his life,
an enemy as threatening as, although far less visible than, the Nazis. It was
the ghosts of memory that pushed him down an elevator shaft in 1987.
Memory, in fact, is the leitmotif in Levi's oeuvre. What do we do with it when
it becomes a burden? What kind of responsibility do we have toward the dead? How
about toward the living? And, equally important, is memory static? Does it
change over time?
There are several biographies of Levi, done by Myriam Anissimov, Carole Angier
and Ian Thomson. And there are estimable volumes of conversations edited by
Ferdinando Camon and Marco Belpoliti. In other words, Levi's odyssey is
well-documented. Still, it is inexhaustible. The choices he made have turned him
into an emblematic icon.
Levi was a member of the anti-Fascist Resistance. He was deported to Auschwitz
in 1944, when he was 15. Upon liberation, as a displaced person, he wandered
through Europe before he returned home. For years he worked as a chemist in a
factory in Turin, until he retired in 1975, at which point he devoted himself
exclusively to literature. From 1987 to 1990, Italian publishing house Giulio
Einaudi Editore produced a multivolume edition of his oeuvre.
In English, his work appears in approximately a dozen books, from "The Mirror
Maker" to "The Search for Roots." Robert Weil, an American editor at W.W. Norton
known for, among other things, his extraordinary volume of the collected works
of Russian writer Isaac Babel, is hoping to produce a collected works for Levi,
a most welcome endeavor. "A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi" is
the hors d'oeuvre.
It consists of 17 pieces. The word "unpublished" in the subtitle is deceitful.
From the 1940s to the late '80s, Levi produced a plethora of tales, many of
which where featured in periodicals such as La Stampa. A few (like "Knall" and
"In the Park") remained uncollected until Belpoliti included them in a couple of
volumes released in 1988.
Ann Goldstein, who has translated Roberto Calasso and is an editor at The New
Yorker, where some of the stories have recently been featured as first serials,
appears to be the brain behind the project and is one of its three translators.
(The third, unlisted on the title page, is Jenny McPhee.) Goldstein divides the
material in the book into two: the early pieces, written from 1949 to 1961, and
the later ones, from 1973 to 1986. The division is designed to give a sense of
chronological development, but it doesn't. The stories are colored by the
inescapable obsession with politics that defines the Italian psyche. They tend
toward the allegorical, but they are also incisive and thought-provoking.
The truth is that most of them leave the reader dissatisfied. They are uneven in
style and structure. Were they not by Levi, I suspect they wouldn't be featured
in a separate book. But because Levi wrote them, they are useful as a window
(albeit a modest one) into his quest for meaning. What emerges in them is a
reminder that Levi wasn't only a survivor: He was a natural storyteller, one
preoccupied with destruction.
The first story, "The Death of Marinese," is the best. It centers on an Italian
partisan taken prisoner by the Germans. As he is being transported, he explodes
a grenade, which results in mayhem. Essentially, he is a suicide bomber. What
makes the tale universal, with a particular resonance for the Middle East of
today, is the sense that a death by martyrdom is better that a life of
humiliation. Told in the third person, it explores, with astonishing care, the
psychology of the vanquished. (There's a similar anecdote in Levi's
autobiographical "The Periodic Table" in which he is the prisoner.)
Levi takes an expository approach in "The TV Fans From Delta Cep.," about an
intergalactic message. In "Knall," he uses the same tone to describe a fictional
"small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much
heavier" that, the reader is told, is quickly becoming a deadly weapon used by
the young. But it suffers from a defect: "[T]he knall kills without bloodshed."
This, Levi tells us, undermines its chances of becoming a true danger to society
because while "the great majority of men feel the need . . . to kill their
neighbor or themselves, . . . in every instance they have the desire 'to shed
blood.' " Levi appears to suggest that terrorism works because it is splashy.
The eerie, compact story "One Night" is about a train sabotaged by a group of
people committed to dismantling it. And another piece is about an amusement park
organized around literature, with a parade of characters by Bram Stoker, Herman
Melville, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rudyard Kipling and James
Joyce.
One of the less-successful stories is "The Girl in the Book," although it
includes a revealing section in which Levi expresses his views on memory. In it
a man from Milan named Umberto, prone to illness (like Levi when he was young),
travels to the seaside with a book in which he reads about a woman named
Harmonika. Then he meets a woman in a park who appears to be the book's source
herself, albeit older and reproachful.
The climax comes in a dialogue they engage in. " 'More than thirty years have
passed, and I am different,' " she says. " 'Memory, too, is different. It's not
true that memories stay fixed in the mind, frozen: they, too, go astray, like
the body.' "
The statement is crucial: Not only does reality change, but so does memory.
Safeguarding it doesn't make it less ephemeral.
The last entry in "A Tranquil Star" is about a remote star that is on the
surface inconsequential but that at any point might explode. It is told from the
viewpoint of an astronomer worried about the future. Maybe that's the combined
message of these stories: After the Holocaust, are we capable of redirecting our
energy away from obliterations and toward hope? Levi's favorite topics are
distilled in these pages: the crossroads of ideology and technology, violence,
fortitude and the role of memory in shaping identity. Yes, he was obsessed with
survival, individual and collective. He had seen the gallows with his own eyes
and had turned to literature -- sparse, crystalline, methodical -- in search of
meaning and as a way to remind society of the evil that man does.
I can't wait for Levi's collected works to be released. It will be an
extraordinary treatise against amnesia.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts. His latest book is "The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories," on which the movie "My Mexican Shivah," produced by John Sayles, is based. His meditation "On Love" is scheduled to be released in the fall.
By Thane Rosenbaum
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist and law
professor and the author of several books, including "Elijah Visible: Stories"
and "The Golems of Gotham."
April 22, 2007
THE Mt. Rushmore of Holocaust remembrance offers a range
of iconic faces: the precocious Anne Frank, the devilish Jerzy Kosinski, the
owlish Aharon Appelfeld and the mournful Elie Wiesel. Yet, despite being set in
stone, the one face that defies easy description belongs to the inscrutable
Primo Levi.
No other writer of atrocity has displayed so many disparate, discordant moods,
from the painfully brooding to the improbably life-affirming, from the
clinically detached to the intimately familiar. Unlike the other bedfellows of
Holocaust memory cast in bedrock, Levi's face remains more sphinx than founding
father.
After all, Levi, a chemist transformed through the alchemy of Auschwitz into one
of the greatest writers of the 20th century, wrote memoirs, essays, poems, short
stories and one novel. Yet, for much of his life he remained the director of a
paint factory. And while he excelled at so many literary trades, he confounded
readers with a vast array of untraceable literary themes.
Levi's first and best-known book, his memoir "Survival in Auschwitz" (which in
Europe was titled "If This Is a Man"), seemed to be written by a different man
than the one who wrote the novel "If Not Now, When?" The memoir was a tersely
cool rendering of the Auschwitz taxonomy. The novel was a more expansive and
emotional portrait of partisans fighting in the forest.
Indeed, there have been several elusive Primo Levis, all writers, but none the
same. His memoirs were obsessively observant, as if written by a scientist and
not a survivor. Levi's poems, by contrast, were dark speculations on the inner
depths of man, the rage of the survivor simmering, unmistakably, above the
surface. Dante, who wrote about a less earthly hell than Auschwitz, was an
obvious influence. Levi's essays took yet another detour by proclaiming more
hopeful possibilities for man. In still another about-face, Levi's fiction
offered whimsy, fantasy and even romance.
And on top of all of these mysteries and contradictions is the greatest of them
all: Twenty years ago, on April 11, Levi, suffering from depression and writer's
block, took his own life without leaving a note of explanation. This final,
wordless coda left a void in world literature. And the effect on Italy was even
worse. Levi was a national treasure, a symbol of what the nation had lost during
World War II — an avuncular, dignified presence in a world that didn't deserve
it. So great and unimaginable was the grief that, to this day, many Italians
maintain that Levi's fall from his apartment landing to the ground floor was an
accident, not a suicide.
Now, to commemorate the inauspicious anniversary of Levi's death, comes "A
Tranquil Star," a collection of 17 stories, translated into English for the
first time by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli. Though Levi had written
poems and stories before he was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, these were
written, and many were published in Italian journals, after his liberation.
Reading "A Tranquil Star" is not unlike wishing upon one. Each story is a
Rorschach test of literary voyeurism. Do they leave any clues about the
psychology of this particular writer, the one who eventually took his own life
despite fooling his readers into thinking that he was a life-affirming optimist?
The stories are breathtaking in their breadth of offerings, yet Levi's clarity
of voice is consistently offset by his familiar misdirection.
"The Death of Marinese" involves a captured partisan who detonates a grenade
from the belt of a Nazi, taking his own life and that of four Nazis with him. "Knall"
is about an invention that looks like a harmless toy but has been casually
embraced as an instrument of death. "In the Park" introduces a national park
that is a fantasy world of famous literary characters, including Holden
Caulfield, Leopold Bloom and Alexander Portnoy. More fantastical elements occur
in some of the later stories such as "The Magic Paint," which features a paint
that wards off evil. And there is even romance: "The Girl in the Book" features
an older man's lust for a mysterious woman at a seaside villa.
Notably absent are any overtly Jewish or Holocaust-related themes. Indeed, the
stories in no way suggest that they were written by a Jewish writer at all, not
to mention one who had survived Auschwitz. Except for two. In "One Night," a
train lumbering through a vernal, nameless landscape halts in the middle of a
long expanse of isolated train tracks only to be met by a group of villagers.
They proceed not only to dismantle the beams and girders of the train but also
the tracks. It is a disturbingly creepy story that screams Holocaust without
announcing itself as such. And in the title story, a worried astronomer
contemplates the possible explosion of a long-dormant star. But in language
almost identical to that in "Survival in Auschwitz," the astronomer ponders the
limitations of language when forced to describe the unimaginable, the very
freaks and accidents of nature that defy human comprehension.
This collection is a noble literary achievement. And yet, it still remains
impossible to evaluate Levi on the basis of literary merit alone. Given what he
endured and witnessed, we are mesmerized by his powers of observation, but we
also know that his vision was forever obscured, refracted through the prism of
the ungodly prison he had survived.
The scientist and writer, co-inhabiting the body of a Holocaust survivor, were
ultimately in conflict with each other. The scientist experimented with various
literary genres but made certain not to become captive to a particular formula.
The survivor wrote precisely, but varyingly, while the chemist ultimately proved
too mercurial for his own good. If Levi's readers were looking to crack the code
to what it meant to survive a death camp, they were destined to sift through
many writerly smokescreens and obstacle courses to human understanding.
"Survival in Auschwitz" wasn't the definitive manual. Levi kept his readers
guessing and ended up one of the Holocaust's true rock stars.
April 21, 2007
A.S.Byatt
A
TRANQUIL STAR
by Primo Levi translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
PRIMO LEVI IS A WRITER we love, as well as admire. We love him for his truthfulness and thoughtfulness. We love him for his power to surprise us with a new concept, or a new way of looking at mind and matter.
A Tranquil Star is a collection of stories, some uncollected, written between 1949 and 1986. They are very varied. Some are joky and some are savage, some are pure fantasy, some realistic.
Many, I think it is fair to say, are very slight. They are whimsical attempts at the kind of elegant unreality that Italo Calvino did much better. Several seem to break the basic rule of fantasy, that the impossible should briefly appear probable and living.
I don’t believe in a kangaroo as a guest at a buffet supper. I can believe in gladiatorial contests between fork-lift trucks and Peugeots and Renaults, but surprisingly, Levi doesn’t make me care about them. I was bored by a visit to a holiday camp full of fictional characters from other books, from Dante’s Beatrice to Portnoy. The idea that poultry might make better censors than humans arouses a brief smile, no more.
There are one or two grimmer tales that almost worked, but in the end remained whimsical. There is The Magic Paint, in which a paint that protects against evil is invented. Levi’s imagination begins to work when he discusses the process of paintmaking, which he knew so well, and there is a good grim ending where a man with the evil eye insists on having his glasses painted with the paint.
There is the tale of an object called a “knall”, the latest craze, after the Hula-Hoop, the yo-yo, Pop Art and Zen Buddhism. It is “a small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier: it is sold loose or in boxes of twenty”. It has tasteless wrappers with jokes about its function, which is to kill people, instantly and silently. The narrator remarks flatly that he doesn’t think the craze will last long because knalls don’t shed blood.
The story has point in these days of teenage gunmen and knifers, but — at least for me — it lacked some final conviction, some edge. I didn’t suspend disbelief for a moment.
Coleridge’s distinction between the fanciful and the imaginative is much to the point here. His The Periodic Tableis one of the great imaginative works of our time. Most of these stories are pleasant fancies. But a few grip the reader’s mind as only Levi can.
Chemistry always sets his imagination to work — he makes us understand the relation between solid objects, metals, stones, liquids, planets, suns, and the elements of which they are made, and into which they can be decomposed. Chemistry — as human beings are — is a meeting place of the finite and the infinite.
The Molecule’s Defiance is the tale of a chemical process that goes horribly wrong in a reactor, a “spoiled batch”. The repulsive and infuriated gelatinous substance is as much a character as the Levi-like narrator and the engineer in shock who has discovered the disaster. Levi makes the reader imagine the action of the molecules and atoms. He makes us see how chains or rosaries of molecules have clumped and solidified. We share a previously unimagined experience.
The title story, A Tranquil Star, tells of the development, over centuries, of a star that finally expands and explodes. Levi tells us he is eschewing “all adjectives that tend to excite wonder” — and this is a clue to his success. He writes flatly but beautifully of what we had not previously imagined in this way. He connects the flaring star and its planets to our fragile and vulnerable Earth. He makes us see.
The other story that excited me — perfect in its way — simply describes a train, stopped near a forest by heaped fallen leaves. An anonymous crowd of “little people” come out of the forest and take the whole thing to pieces, breaking up everything, including the engine, into small fragments. It is sinister and mysterious. Like Levi’s successful work, it depends on the simultaneous imagining of the solidity of matter, and its dispersal and vanishing.
April 29, 2007
Lucy Hughes-Hallet
A TRANQUIL STAR: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi
Penguin Classics £20 pp165
Primo Levi’s terse, terrifyingly lucid accounts of his experiences as a partisan and in Auschwitz have made him one of the most revered writers of the past century, not only because of their stark formal originality (at his best he wrote as though literary tradition didn’t exist, as though his means of expression were determined solely by his subject matter) but because they interrogate so directly the essence of things. These stories — slight though most of them are — demonstrate that, even when idly musing, or playing literary jokes, Levi never lost sight of the essential. A mini-comedy of manners about a kangaroo attending a buffet dinner, and a science-fiction fantasy about 10-armed aliens, each raises the question of what, if anything, the human race has to be proud of. The answers (in the first case nothing whatsoever, in the second the invention of tomato purée) are equally disheartening.
This volume’s subtitle is misleading: these stories have been available in Italian for decades. Its implication (that they are mere leftovers) is only partly justified. Certainly, there are pieces here only the devout Levi-fan will welcome. An absurdist parable about an imaginary state where the censor is a chicken has outlived its moment. A laboured fantasy about a limbo inhabited by literary characters is interesting only as an indication of Levi’s reading, and as a vehicle for his sardonic critique of romanticism in fiction.
Levi was, of course, a chemist, and there are stories here in which his characteristic dispassionate scientific observation and sense of the glittering enormity of human nature and human society come together to create exquisitely controlled intellectual explosions. In Knall, Levi — speaking, as he often does, in the deliberately flat voice of an obtuse or emotionally numb fictional reporter — describes a new craze (succeeding those for pop art, Zen Buddhism, and the hula-hoop) for a “handy device”, pocket-sized, available either singly or in packs of 20 and unfailingly lethal. The horror of this trend is carefully obscured. Without expressing any shock or fear, the reporter wonders coolly if the fashion can last, given that death-by-knall is bloodless and therefore unsatisfying to the perpetrator: Levi is reporting an abomination as though for a style section. So in Gladiators he imagines gruesome scenes of violence as popular entertainment (men armed with hammers forced to confront charging cars), but frames them with a banal, jocularly expressed story of disagreement between a couple in the audience. Subtle, indirect and softly spoken, these small stories spread a large chill.
A longer narrative, Sorcerers, asks Levi’s perennial question about the worth of our civilisation. Two English anthropologists are stranded in the Bolivian rainforest. The people they are studying, the Siriono, withhold food from anyone unable to do useful work. The Englishmen, awaiting rescue, desperately try to show their hosts that they are worth keeping alive. They have some matches, which interest the Siriono, but their interest turns to derision when it transpires that the anthropologists don’t know how to make more. The story ends ambiguously: the narrator, this time apparently the author himself, informs us that the Siriono really exist and demonstrate that not all of humanity is “destined to advance”. But who is advancing? And to what end? The kangaroo-protagonist of Buffet Dinner, having observed how ill-designed men and women are for leaping, thinks kindly, “You never can tell, maybe they were good at other things.” Levi, who was found dead in 1987, seems to have doubted it.
Primo Levi was shy, quietly domestic (though fascinated by "adventure") and devoted most of his days to running a chemical factory. He had many interests and great appetite for life yet remained alert to the darker aspects of the human condition. All of these things, and the calm lucidity of his voice, combine to make him such a powerful and humane witness to the Holocaust. They also give depth to many of his pieces on far less momentous themes.
This new collection, published for the 20th anniversary of his death, brings together 19 previously untranslated stories dating from 1949 to 1986. It includes its fair share of whimsy, extended anecdotes and laboured squibs, including one about a kangaroo at a cocktail party. Yet much of it is marvellous.
It opens with a tense vignette about a might-have-been act of courage, when a wartime Italian partisan is taken prisoner by the Germans, as Levi was, and manages to kill several of his captors by pulling the cord out of a grenade. Another story celebrates his passion for mountains: five climbing enthusiasts meet by chance in a remote hut and describe the reckless acts which got them hooked on what one calls "the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free."
Levi led a happy life before his deportation to Auschwitz, and several stories explore the enigmas of political barbarism or sudden storms of terror. There is something Kafkaesque about "One Night", in which a train is torn apart by a mysterious group of people, "as if all order and all structure conflicted with some ideal they shared".
Other stories are more reminiscent of Borges. "Bureau of Vital Statistics" tells of an administrator employed to allot causes of death to people whose time is running out. In "The Girl in the Book", Umberto discovers that an ageing Lithuanian woman was once "a lover without equal". When he asks her, she replies: "My love affairs.... are fine where they are: in my memory, faded, withered, with a trace of perfume, like a collection of dried flowers. In yours they have become shiny and bright like plastic toys."
Levi's expertise as a paint manufacturer, rather surprisingly, forms the basis for two fine stories. "The Magic Paint" starts in deadpan professional mode, describing the markets for "paints that transmit heat or reflect it, that keep mollusks from adhering to hulls, that absorb sound, or that can be removed from a surface like a peel from a banana". But what is a businessman to do when his agent offers him "a paint which provided protection from misfortune"?
Even better is "The Molecule's Defiance", a very creepy story about a batch of varnish that spoils and becomes "a disgusting yellow mass full of lumps and nodules". Levi the chemist was also a man for whom Auschwitz destroyed forever any notion of a benign universe. A Tranquil Star is rather patchy, but moments like this remind us just how great a writer he was.
Matthew J Reisz edits the 'Jewish Quarterly'
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May 19, 2007
A TRANQUIL STAR
By Primo Levi
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
Norton, 170 pages, $27.50
In the intimate constellation of Holocaust writers, Primo Levi has always stood apart as a strangely welcoming presence. Elie Wiesel implores and shames us like a frustrated prophet. Jerzy Kozinsky and Tadeusz Borowski chill us with deadpan brutality. Paul Celan's poetic anguish tears open its own language.
But the numerous works of Primo Levi never fit the mould of the haunted survivor. Despite the explicit horror contained in his memoirs, novels and stories, and notwithstanding his likely suicide at the age of 77, Levi's writing is definitively life-affirming. Even in his terrifying Survival at Auschwitz (published originally as If This is a Man) the narration is personable, engaging, demonstrating a strange grace and even, shockingly, wit.
It is this wit and warmth that compels us to read Levi's "other" fiction -- that is, the material that is not explicitly or exclusively about the Holocaust. The Periodic Table, which first brought him attention in North America, is an ode to chemistry, a profession that saved him in the camps and at which he worked for much of his postwar life. And while we always read Levi with the awareness of his Holocaust experiences in the background, the exploration of those experiences is never the only reward we glean from his writing.
Now we have a collection of previously untranslated stories to further bolster our image of Levi as a writer with wider interests and talents than the casual reader might assume.
Be assured. These are not unpublished juvenilia or discarded drafts, such as those we have seen published recently "by" Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison and I. B. Singer. Levi saw all of these pieces through to publication in Italian, and we can only assume that they had not been translated previously because most of them do not deal specifically with his best-known subject. The translators, Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, do an admirable job capturing Levi's somewhat formal but inviting tone, and include a brief but helpful introduction to place the stories in some context, as well as a list of the Italian publication information for those who might want to pursue the originals.
A Tranquil Star spans almost 40 years of stories, tales and anecdotes. What it lacks in thematic coherence, though, it makes up for in a unity of tone. Levi's decorous voice -- seamlessly translated -- is clear and engaging throughout, and while some of the pieces might be classified as "minor" compared to Levi's other works, all of them give pleasure and a few are real gems. One of these, The Death of Marinese, is the earliest of the collection, having been published in 1949, and demonstrates the remarkably human perspective Levi brought to the most desperate of circumstances. A partisan has been captured by the Nazis and, while being transported in a truckload of soldiers, manages to set off a grenade. What's remarkable about the piece is that, rather than describe him as either victim or hero, Levi endows him with a matter-of-fact sympathy that is both more pedestrian and more bizarre: "He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he knew, too, that soon all this would regain importance. But for now he felt strangely protected by a burning shield of fever and sleep. ... Vacation, he thought, almost in a dream: how long had it been since he had had a vacation?"
A similarly profound engagement is present in many of these stories, whether they are about mountain climbers, bureaucrats or an unfortunate guest at a dinner party, whose social discomfort derives largely from the fact that he is a kangaroo.
In his short fiction, Levi frequently dabbled in an intellectualized science fiction that can occasionally feel dated -- a kind of cross between Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Jorge Luis Borges. Levi is never as wildly inventive as the best of Vonnegut, nor as intellectually eye-opening as Borges. At their best, though, Levi's discoveries are resonant in a way that seems more deeply empathetic, that sees the banal in the sinister, and vice versa.
Knall, for instance, is a strange little story about a brief fad for a nondescript toy, similar to a hula hoop or pinwheel, except that it can cause instant death. Gladiators imagines a world, half-comic and half-horrifying, where audiences cheer as men battle with automobiles. And The Molecule's Defiance manages to equate the spoiling of a batch of paint resin with the presence of evil in the world.
Someone new to Primo Levi is still better off starting with The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved or Survival at Auschwitz, which stand among the most important books of the 20th century. But for those already familiar with him, this collection will be a welcome addition to a cherished oeuvre, and a testament to a literary vision that transcends the harrowing biography of its creator.
Adam Sol's second collection of poetry, Crowd of Sounds, won the Trillium Award. He is completing a novel in poems, Jeremiah, Ohio.
May 27, 2007
By JONATHAN ROSEN
By Primo Levi. Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli.
164 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $21.95.
Twenty years ago last month, Primo Levi plunged headlong into the stairwell of the apartment building in Turin where he had been born and to which he had returned after liberation from Auschwitz. At the time, there was a great deal of debate about the nature and meaning of his death: was it an accident or a suicide, illness or cosmic despair? But it is surely the way he lived and wrote in the four decades after the war that matter most. If the ancient Greeks were right that it is the manner of one’s death as much as the substance of one’s life that determines its ultimate meaning, then much of European Jewry, not to mention European culture, would need to be written off as an abject failure.
Levi is justly revered for his masterly memoirs, beginning with “Survival in Auschwitz” and continuing through “The Reawakening,” “The Periodic Table” and finally, and most darkly, “The Drowned and the Saved.” “Survival in Auschwitz” was written in a white heat soon after Levi’s liberation and published in 1947, though translation and recognition came much more slowly. It has often been noted, but is worth noting again, that the American title represents an unfortunate decision by the publisher to replace the haunting Italian title, “Se Questo È un Uomo” — “If This Is a Man” — with a more utilitarian one. The decision signals a confusion that exists in Levi’s reputation and that perhaps existed even inside of him: the urge to poeticize and philosophize competing with the need to bear witness, to record in as literal and straightforward a manner as possible the Nazi war against Western civilization in general and Jews in particular. But in all his writing, Levi, who worked as an industrial chemist much of his life, combined scientific detachment with deep, sympathetic imagination, a combination that allowed him to parse with excruciating clarity all the degradations — large and small, physical, psychic and spiritual — of the Nazi genocide.
In keeping with the complexity and confusions of being a philosopher-witness, Levi was also a poet and a fiction writer. Though he wrote an honorable novel about a band of Jewish partisans, “If Not Now, When?” (Levi himself was a partisan before his arrest and shipment to Auschwitz), he was more successful with short stories. He was a master of a peculiar hybrid form, a sort of science fiction that seems half Ray Bradbury and half Kafka, with an added undertow that threatens to carry the reader into an abyss of dark knowledge even though the Holocaust is almost never overtly mentioned.
There are many fine examples of Levi’s strange fictional style in “A Tranquil Star,” a collection of 17 previously untranslated stories rendered into lucid, seamless English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli. The book is divided into two sections corresponding roughly to two phases of Levi’s career. In the first, he was a full-time chemist and paint-factory manager who wrote in the margins of that life; in the second he was a full-time writer, having achieved enough renown and security to leave his job in the mid-1970s. But all of these stories live under and inside the shadow of the Holocaust, and it would be futile, and perhaps a betrayal, to divest them of their context by reading them any other way. Even a story like “Bear Meat” (1961), which recalls a free-spirited prewar trip into the mountains that Levi took with two friends, has its post-Holocaust reverberations. Unequipped for their alpine journey, the boys in the story are soon forced to “eat bear meat,” slang for tasting extreme discomfort. They are lost and exhausted, and barely survive freezing in the night, but the narrator looks back on the experience with dreamy longing. Respect, love, success — “none of these things,” he says, “has the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world.” By focusing on nostalgia not for prewar pleasure but for prewar pain, Levi shrewdly evokes a time when hardship too had an innocence, when it tempered the human spirit rather than extinguishing it.
“Bear Meat” — retold in the first person in “The Periodic Table,” without the Conradian frame Levi gives it here — is an anomaly in this collection. More characteristic is the deadpan science-fiction style of a story like “Gladiators” (1976), in which battles between cars and people are all the rage, a sort of modern-day bullfighting. A reluctant man brings his eager girlfriend. The spectacle sickens both of them, the crowd chants not for death but for mercy when one of the gladiators is wounded, yet these touches of compassion somehow make the ordeal not only more plausible but also more painful. What Levi’s story captures, and passes on to the reader, is the guilt that observers feel just for having been there at all; their mere presence implicates them. It is the sensation he noticed in the eyes of his Russian liberators in “The Reawakening,” the shame “the just man experiences at another man’s crime.”
This shame, as much as the crimes of the Germans, was the human stain that darkened and spread over Levi’s long career. His radical humanism kept him from taking refuge in “us and them” distinctions — he was much more focused on the shame of the species. (Unlike Eli Wiesel, Levi — a highly assimilated Jew — never quarrels with God, in whom he did not believe even as a young man.) But despite his rational stance, human guilt took on mystical overtones in his work, and can seem a sort of belated original sin. It’s bound up with the question, which troubles all his writing, of whether his time in Auschwitz was a season in hell or a glimpse of the true condition of the world.
That question haunts these stories as well. The possibility of transcendent evil is felt with great force in “The Molecule’s Defiance” (1980), a seemingly straightforward account of a night at a factory that grows sinister when a vast batch of resin forms a single monster-molecule and bursts free of its container. “The hatch rose by itself, not suddenly but gently, solemnly, as when tombs open and the dead arise.” The palpable dread comes not from the fear of an explosion or the loss of a night’s work or the expectation of reprimand that dogs the chemist on duty, but from a kind of moral sickness, a sense that evil has sunk into the very molecular structure of the world. “A fire or an explosion can be a much more destructive accident, even tragic,” the narrator tells us, “but it’s not disgraceful, like a gelatinization.”
In “The Periodic Table,” Levi offered the dead of Auschwitz not a spiritual afterlife but a sort of chemical one, imagining, in his final chapter, the way a single atom of carbon might cycle back into the living world, ingested by the author and transformed almost mystically into a dot on the page of the book he is writing. But this image of rational scientific rescue is undone in a story like “The Molecule’s Defiance,” where the laws of science do not seem rational at all. Instead of each molecule having “two hands” that form an elegant “rosary,” they develop a third hand and then “every rosary joins with two or three other rosaries, and in the end they’ve formed a single molecule, a monster.” Religious imagery overwhelms scientific language, and all the irrational elements that Levi recoiled from in human society seem to have penetrated the very fabric of the universe.
One feels this as well in a story like “Knall” (1971), a pseudowhimsical dispatch on a short tool, “thick as a Tuscan cigar,” that has become vastly popular, a kind of deadly fashion accessory that can kill at close range, leaving no sign of trauma on the corpse. The name, of course, is German — the narrator tells us it means “crack, bang, crash.” But what makes the story so Levian is the mixture of humor, detachment and underlying disgust. In his careful, deadpan manner, the narrator notes that the knall is fired by “a precise and rhythmic sequence of twists in one direction and then the other,” and that “exploded knalls are darker and more flaccid than unused ones.” And though it may be true that sometimes a cigar-shaped implement of destruction is just a cigar-shaped implement of destruction, the story is indeed emblematic of something powerfully Swiftian in Levi’s work, where political disgust and human disgust bleed into each other.
“Buffet Dinner” (1977) is the most Swiftian story of all, an account of a fancy dinner party at which the invited guests somehow include a kangaroo, navigating the human scene with excruciating awkwardness. The animal, with its “triangle of white fur,” clearly has the author’s sympathy, but the story conveys more than the difficulty of the outsider/survivor trying to fit into a life of trivial civility. There is distaste for the human animals as well as shame for the kangaroo, who relieves himself in a houseplant and then eats some of its leaves before finally fleeing.
Levi’s human discomfort preceded his enslavement — in “Survival in Auschwitz,” he described himself as a repressed young man who, in part because of the self-consciousness imposed by four years of anti-Jewish laws, as well as by temperament, had lived before Auschwitz in “an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships.” He was “liberated” by Auschwitz in certain complex, paradoxical ways that filled him with pride and self-recrimination.
In some sense, Levi’s endless theme is Freud’s notion, in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” that man can stand neither repression nor the lifting of repression. Not having a divine idea of human nature, Levi was constantly exposing the fault lines of secular humanism — he defended human dignity even as he developed a growing sense that the human animal was somehow indefensible. Despite many memoirs, he almost never wrote as a husband or father, though he was both, which further complicates our understanding of his vision of life. Though he has become a sort of secular saint, he can often seem like Michelangelo’s Christ in “The Last Judgment,” turning away coldly from the saved even as he consigns the sinners to hell.
But Levi’s heroism as a writer is felt everywhere in his work. The committed intelligence of his voice offers its own deep consolation, however bleak his vision became and however tempted he was to flee, like Gulliver, from a species that had fallen lower than the beasts. Gulliver began looking at his face in the mirror as a way of training himself to tolerate again the sight of a human creature. Levi, in these ingenious and disquieting stories as in the rest of his writing, held up a mirror to his own mind, and in so doing performed a lasting service. After the barbarisms of the last century — which have followed us into this one — reading Levi remains an indispensable way of readapting ourselves to the complexity of being human.
Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook. His most recent novel is “Joy Comes in the Morning.”
Other Worlds
Sunday, July 1, 2007; BW06
A TRANQUIL STAR
Unpublished Stories
By Primo Levi
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldsteinand Alessandra Bastagli
Norton. 164 pp. $21.95
Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist and writer who died 20 years ago, is best known for his 1959 memoir Survival in Auschwitz. But this new collection of stories -- all previously unpublished in English -- will surely surprise readers familiar with Levi as a "Holocaust writer" or even those who know the semi-autobiographical stories in The Periodic Table. A Tranquil Star is a cabinet of curiosities, in which the realistic pieces are ordinary compared to the array of fascinating items Levi has culled from his imagination of worlds beyond our own.
In "Bureau of Vital Statistics," for instance, a frustrated man reports to his office for what appears to be an ordinary clerical position, until we slowly realize that his job is to assign causes of death to people on Earth. In "Gladiators," a woman reluctantly agrees to join her boyfriend at a popular sporting event -- where the "sport" consists of pedestrians dueling against cars. "Knall" describes a consumer craze for a pocket-sized gadget that instantly and silently murders people, but only at point-blank range.
Each of these stories is only a few pages long, and perhaps it's best to reveal as little about them as possible, so as not to ruin the reader's delight upon discovering the moment when the surreal finally saturates the real.
For another writer, this sort of "punch line" approach to plot might become little more than a gimmick. But the cumulative effect of these stories -- each written in the same elegant, unpretentious prose that defined Levi's memoirs -- is to make one wonder about the prevailing philosophy that brought these many imagined worlds into a single mind. And as one reads, that philosophy becomes clear. In each story we are introduced to a twist on our world that is, on closer examination, not really a twist at all. The shocking elements of these stories are precisely the points where they correspond to our own world: the sick spectacle that we make of brutal violence, the casual possibility of murder based on whim, the systems of terror and war that knowingly set the causes of others' deaths.
As a collection of nearly all of Levi's previously untranslated fiction, this book does include the occasional tale in which inanity trumps insight. But the most poignant stories here are those that deal with the act of writing itself, and in particular its failure to meet the expectation of immortality. As the narrator relates in "The Fugitive," about a poem that physically eludes its author's grasp, "To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives." Levi has been granted this gift of destiny, and American readers now have the gift of rediscovering it.
-- Dara Horn is the author of the novels "In the Image" and "The World to Come."
A Tranquil
Star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
W.W. Norton, 167 pp., $21.95
To read the hauntingly whimsical, wondrously sculpted stories of Primo Levi is to experience life at its most austere, stripped of the excesses with which we adorn existence so as to viscerally illuminate what it means to be human.
In these 17 stories, published by the famed Auschwitz survivor in his native Italy from 1949 to 1986, and translated into English in this collection by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli to commemorate his death in 1987, the elemental ascends to the allegorical. Levi affirms the imperative of being singularly alive, unshackled by social constraints, his wisdom as fierce as it is playful, as unwavering as it is gracious.
In "Bear Meat," a 1961 story recently published in The New Yorker, a climber survives a hike by eating bear meat, a primal act that provided "the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world." In "The Fugitive," a 1979 story, an insurance company employee writes a poem that "seemed perfect: not a line or syllable had to be changed." But it takes on a physical life of its own, fleeing its author, who never again experiences the "whistles nor shivers" of such an epiphany.
Often, Levi vents his rage over the tyranny of such collectives as Nazism and fascism on the individual, who transcends the madness. "The Death of Marinese," a 1949 story, spans the last 10 seconds of the life of a man taken captive by German soldiers. He chooses to kill himself and them with a grenade. In "Censorship in Bitinia," a 1961 story and one of the more darkly satiric, animals censor people. "Curiously, the mammals closest to humans were found to be least useful for the task." In "Fra Diavolo on the Po," an autobiographical 1986 story, his contempt for the military is on full display.
Elsewhere, Levi explores tyrannies deeper than the political and ideological, such as modernity's technological and bureaucratic indifference. In "The Magic Paint," a 1973 story, a manufacturer comes across a paint that protects what it coats from misfortune and tests it on the glasses of a man whose right eye casts misfortune. The paint inside the lenses reflects misfortune back on the man, who dies. In "Bureau of Vital Statistics," a 1981 story, an official quits his job in an office that decides who dies, when, and why.
In "A Tranquil Star," an especially poignant 1978 story also recently published in The New Yorker, and the last of the collection, what it means to be human comes to be measured in limitations, suggesting life is ultimately unknowable and mutable, rather than knowable and permanent. In the decency such humility allows, we find our greatest strength, an eloquent close to this collection, whose questions are eternal.
Robert Braile reviews regularly for the Globe.
THE TLS n.º 5441
July 13, 2007
Primo Levi's journeys to peace
The taste of freedom
Clive Sinclair
Primo Levi
A TRANQUIL STAR
Unpublished stories
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
164pp. Penguin. £20.
978 0 713 99955 6
On the jacket and the title page the stories in A Tranquil Star
are described as “unpublished”. The editor, in her introduction,
is more accurate, calling them “untranslated”. They are divided
into two sections, “Early Stories” and “Later Stories”, though
only “The Death of Marinese” (which dates from 1949) can really
be described as early. Like If This Is a Man, this story
concerns the recently ended war, though it is a work of fiction
not autobiography. It tells how Marinese and Sante, two
partisans, meet their ends; the one actively, the other
passively.
Describing the composition of If This Is a Man to Philip Roth,
Primo Levi insisted it was done with “no definite literary
intention”, and that his model was the weekly report used in
factories, whose style was precise, concise and universally
comprehensible. This scientific detachment, this seeming
disinterestedness, is apparent too in “The Death of Marinese”.
And yet barely concealed in the short text is a sequence of
images that seem to demand a more complex understanding.
When Marinese and Sante are taken away by the Germans in the
back of an overcrowded truck, the former is described as
slipping to the floor, where his head becomes wedged between the
“bony hips” of two soldiers. Once there he begins to dream, and
imagines himself “submerged in a long, narrow tunnel that had
been dug into a soft, tepid substance, crimson like the light
that penetrates closed eyelids”. In this reverie he feels
himself moving, as if he were being pushed towards an exit.
There is more. He removes a grenade – the type “shaped like a
stick”, adds Levi – from the belt of the nearest soldier, and
unscrews the safety cap. When it is within seconds of exploding,
he rolls himself into the foetal position, “face down, his knees
drawn up against his chest, the grenade wedged between his
knees, his arms tight around them”. Finally, he “filled his
lungs to prepare for battle and pulled the cord with all his
might”. Except that it is not an umbilical cord, but the cord of
the grenade, and it is death he’s about to experience, not
birth. The imagery is simply too consistent to be coincidental.
But what does it add to an already fine story?
In Carole Angier’s biography of Levi, The Double Bond (2002), we
learn that Levi’s first child had been born in 1948. What if
Levi had been thinking of the birth of Lisa as much as the death
of Marinese when he composed the story? In that case the whole
assumes a Janus-like quality, looking both to the past, and to
the future. Another piece of evidence is the story’s concluding
sentence, which is a sort of corroboration: “The truck was
abandoned, and we captured it the following night”. No mention
of the horrid aftermath of Marinese’s heroic deed. The truck is
clean, and ready to transport its creator towards a more pacific
world. In this reading, “The Death of Marinese” is a bridge
between the past and the future, between war and peace, between
vice and virtue, between the Lager and the world, between
realism and the uncharted imagination. Fittingly, it first
appeared in a journal called Il Ponte.
The next story in the collection is dated 1961, and was
published in Il Mondo. Called “Bear Meat”, it is set amid the
mountains, though it also contains the salty tang of the sea. It
has multiple narrators, one of whom explains that ursine flesh
is a metaphor for “the taste of being strong and free, which
means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the
mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the
world”. And that taste, according to the speaker, is worth more
than repose, love, success and all of life’s other rewards. As
it happens, these words echo an exhortation made centuries
before. By whom?
“Bear Meat” contains allusions to two writers, one named, the
other not. The named writer is Dante. One of the story’s
narrators cites various passages from the Divine Comedy which
describe the progress of the poet and his guide across the peaks
of the Underworld, from which he deduces that Dante must have
done some climbing himself. The other writer is a sailor, author
of a book “dear” to Levi. Here, the critic must confess his
ignorance. The only sailors he can think of referred to by Levi
(not counting Noah) are Ulysses, Aeneas, Robinson Crusoe and the
Ancient Mariner, all of whom tasted copious amounts of bear meat
in their time. Suffice it to say that the story brings together
Dante and the sea, which irresistibly leads to Canto 26 of the
Inferno, in which Ulysses makes the exhortation whose echo has
just been heard.
It is this same passage, of course, which provides the title for
the most mysterious – and enchanting – chapter of If This Is A
Man. A fellow inmate of the Lager – already fluent in French and
German (he’s an Alsatian) – says he would like to learn Italian.
Levi offers to give him a lesson. For unknown reasons the
aforementioned canto pops into his head (though not in its
entirety), and he decides to use it as the basis for the first
(and maybe last) class. He recalls the lines that mean so much
in the camp, “Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your
mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after
knowledge and excellence”. But he cannot bring to mind anything
more than fragments of the lines that precede them. In the
missing lines, Ulysses apologetically renounces son, father,
wife and all the comforts of Ithaca, so that he may fully
experience the vices and virtues of mankind. More than that, he
persuades his mariners to follow him to where none has ventured
before, to the unpeopled world beyond the sunset, where bear
meat is the plat du jour. In other words, Dante’s Ulysses takes
a very different route from that prescribed by Homer.
Needless to say, when liberated from Auschwitz, Levi imitated
the more ancient mariner, and found his way back to Turin.
Indeed the retelling of that journey stands in the same relation
to If This Is A Man, as the Odyssey does to the Iliad. But “Bear
Meat” and other stories in A Tranquil Star hint that Levi
sometimes wished he had taken the example of Dante’s damned hero
and followed his star to the world’s end, had been a Marinese
rather than a Sante.
Instead, the seas Levi sailed were all inside his head. Like his
great contemporary and friend, Italo Calvino, he described
imaginary worlds and distant planets, as well as the microcosmic
universe of industrial chemistry, and the comforting rhythms of
work. But however far he went, and whatever he did, his anchor
always remained embedded in the Lager’s unhallowed ground.
The collection’s title story (which is also its concluding one)
begins as if it were a fairy story, or even an episode of Star
Wars, and continues in a more scientific vein, as Levi laments
the lack of a proper vocabulary to convey the immensity of
space. Readers familiar with If This Is A Man will recall a
similar complaint regarding the inability of language to do
justice to the unique conditions in the Lager.
Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word . . . . If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near.
Rather than examining the consequences of an inhuman experiment, the job of
Ramon Escojido in “A Tranquil Star” is to study the heavens through a telescope.
He is happy in his isolated observatory, but his wife and two children are not.
What keeps the family united are regular weekend outings.
But on the weekend Levi describes, this equilibrium is disturbed by signs that
the tranquil star may be anything but, may in fact have gone supernova. And so
Escojido has to make a decision; will he keep his commitment to his family, or
will he keep an eye on that world behind the sunset? Unlike his creator he
follows the example of Dante’s Ulysses, and places curiosity over
responsibility.
And what did Levi hope to find in those worlds he could imagine, but never
visit? Perhaps what he wanted to witness was a virtuous enterprise commensurate
with the vicious horror he had already witnessed. By electing to remain
homebound, however, he added at least three volumes to the shelf of essential
books, and several more – including the one under review – that ask us to
consider what it means to be a man. He might not have been a Marinese, but he
always was a mensch.
Clive Sinclair's new book, Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West, will be
published next spring.
His
novels include Meet the Wife, 2002.