A Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories) (review)

Abstract

Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories), by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 167 pp. $21.95. Twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as and survivor. Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Susan Sontag all weighed in, but the debate over his death has overshadowed the larger significance of his place as thinker after Auschwitz. This new collection of Levi's writings, the first publication in English of Levi's fiction since 1990, gives readers sampling of his extraordinary intellect and wide range. It is mere appetizer for Norton's ambitious project to publish Levi's entire oeuvre in volumes sometime before the decade is out. Two stories, Bear Meat and A Tranquil Star, appeared earlier this year in the New Yorker while Knall first appeared in Harper's. The stories are deftly translated by Ann Goldstein (a at the New Yorker) and Alessandra Bastagli (writer and editor at Palgrave Macmillan). Jenny McPhee, writer, novelist, and scholar in residence at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, translated Censorship in Bitinia. Since Levi is not as well known in the United States as Elie Wiesel, readers might have been helped by some biographical details in the introduction. Levi's memoir of life in the extermination camp. Survival in Auschwitz, has claimed its rightful place among the masterpieces of literature. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Levi began picaresque odyssey, as recounted in The Truce. His last work, The Drowned and the Saved, is arguably the most profound meditation on the Shoah. Although best known for these works on the concentration camp universe, Levi did not want to be known as Holocaust writer; he aspired to the simple title of writer without any adjective (Holocaust, Italian, or Jewish). Besides his masterpieces, Levi also wrote poetry, essays, science fiction, and novel concerning Jewish partisans in World War II. As both chemist and writer, Levi felt the divorce of science from humanism as the tragic flaw of the twentieth century. These stories try to reconcile the two cultures. He reveled in this stance straddling worlds. I am centaur, he once wrote enigmatically, as all men and women are centaurs: a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. …