SHORT FICTION
Exploring essences
RUDOLF SIMONE
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This collection testifies that Primo Levi is much more than a reporter of the Holocaust.
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And finally two stories that defy categorisation: “Fra Diavolo on the Po” and “Tranquil Star”. The first, written five months before Levi took his life, is a first person narrative that opens with the drafting into the Navy of the narrator and ends after he has survived Auschwitz, with the shocking realisation that, as if nothing had happened in the intervening period, he is still registered for the naval draft. Fearing that an entire period of world history could be forgotten overnight, “Tranquil Star”, the closing story of this collection, explores, through the attempt to report on the explosion of a star, what it means for a task to be too demanding, for language to breakdown and be inadequate, for
To mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, Penguin Books has released A Tranquil Star, a collection of his short stories. These stories, published for the first time in English t
ranslation, should be of interest to readers who know Levi primarily for his Holocaust writings.
Central experience
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from the University of Turin in 1942 with a degree in chemistry and the gruelling 10 months he spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz would compel him to voice his story: from the early testimonial writings of If This is a Man (1947), to the middle period short stories of The Periodic Table (1975) and the final attempt at rationalisation and admonition in The
Drowned and the Saved (1986). But writing about his ordeal was not sufficient to assuage the memory of it, and in the late morning of April 11, 1987, Levi, who lived in the third floor apartment where he was born, was found dead at the foot of the building’s spiral staircase.
Levi is, of course, a reporter of the Holocaust and someone whose literary talent was triggered by that deeply dehumanising event, but the diversity and richness of this collection testifies that he is a writer of much wider scope and talent. As early as 1947 in “The Death of Marinese”, a third person narrative of two captured partisans who defy the Germans’ authority when Marinese detonates the grenade of the soldier watching over him, Levi displays his stylistic mastery of the short story and desire to assert in writing that act of resistance he was incapable of in action.
These themes of courage, strength and destruction reappear in stories such as “Bear Meat” and “One Night”. The first is a starkly physical description of the hardships of mountain-climbing, while the second is a broadly poetic tale of “little men and women” who emerge from a forest in the dead of night to dismantle a train before turning against each other. The reader is reminded of the senseless brutality that a tranquil landscape can witness and the possible misuses of technological advancement when industrialisation is set at the service of destruction. And though these stories may appear one-dimensional, they assert a series of archetypes — be they a character, an action, a relationship or a state of mind. They are modern day myths that explore one facet of life in its essence.
Ironic take
Then there are the allegorical stories: meticulously crafted, sometimes fantastical and often steeped in irony. “Censorship in Bitania”, for example, describes the comically unsuccessful attempt of the imaginary Bitanian State to recruit staff to the censorship office and its decision to settle for “animals trained for the purpose”. The irony of this story derives not only from events such as the division manager of the censorship bureau dying “in suffocation when an avalanche of files falls on him”, but from the larger notions that bureaucrats who do their job by rote are no better than domesticated animals, and that where the reality of a situation is so absurd, one can rewrite that absurdity however one pleases and it makes little difference whether the staff consists of human beings or barnyard chickens.
Of the literary stories where Levi unbridles his pen, “In the Park” is a scintillating example. It is an enchanting tale of authors and their characters who live in an imaginary post-modern world where Francois Villon inhabits a “prefab house” and Rabelais repeats what “he must have heard from Pantagruel”. The only drawback is that lifespan in this world is tied to richness of composition or character, so that when our memory of a character begins to fade he becomes diaphanous. But then again, having witnessed a world where race and religion was the foremost criterion of selection, quality of literary output is not such a bad benchmark.
Beyond categories
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