Primo Levi, in Short

You don’t think of Primo Levi writing fiction, particularly short stories, but it makes sense: a great writer needs to write, and that urge can be met—is usually met, has to be met—in many different ways. Not everything a great writer writes is great. But somewhere, invariably, it has telltale touches of greatness in it, and so it is here with Levi, one of the Holocaust’s most important chroniclers.

Even before he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Levi wrote. He resumed writing after the war, composing his classic memoir, If This Is a Man, in 1947 and continuing for all of those years when, famously, he ran a paint factory in Turin. He continued to write, now full-time, when fame belatedly came to him in the 1980s, and carried on up to his perplexing and profoundly upsetting death, probably a suicide, in 1987.

But throughout, even as he added The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, and other longer works to his oeuvre, Levi simultaneously wrote and published short fiction. Some of those stories, translated lovingly and elegantly from Italian by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, make up this thin volume. They come in a variety of styles: quasi-autobiography, satire, magic realism, parable. Those who revere Levi will want to read them all, uneven though they are. They will want to because they love him, and because, though the stories’ form may be unfamiliar, in them his distinctive voice, understated and wise, witty and inspirational, comes wondrously back to life.

Levi’s goal with these works was characteristically modest. “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,” he said once, as Goldstein reminds us in her introduction. “Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad.”

The moods vary. “The Death of Marinese,” for instance, is a dose of verismo, recounting the final journey of an Italian partisan captured by the Wehr-macht. “Bear Meat” relates the experiences of some mountain climbers (one of Levi’s own favorite hobbies), and the peculiar exhilaration of peril. “In the Park” is a fantasy in which a man visits a place filled with literary characters and settings—where the garden of the Finzi-Contini is close by the houses of Buddenbrooks and Usher, not far from Uncle Tom’s cabin. It’s a Dante-esque world, and indeed, Beatrice lives there, too, tormenting everyone from what appears to be a rent-controlled castle. Though Portnoy and Holden Caulfield also reside there, many of the references will be unclear to American readers. What they show, though, is that when Levi wasn’t mixing paint, or writing, he was reading.

This world, like literature itself, is really a selectively enhanced version of reality. “Here,” the tour-guide/narrator tells his visitor, “you will not find a sea captain who has not been shipwrecked, a wife who has not been an adulteress, a painter who does not live in poverty for long years and then become famous.” Even the sunsets are extraordinary: “Often they last from early afternoon until night, and sometimes darkness falls and then the light returns and sun sets again, as if it were grant-ing an encore.”

Like many of the stories, “Censorship in Bitinia” (translated by Jenny McPhee) is something out of Kafka, an absurdly funny (and visionary) portrait of a place so eager to suppress seditious material that a crushing (literally: one censor is smothered beneath a toppled pile of unfiltered manuscripts) backlog develops, forcing it to use computers, then hens, to do the job. A similarly dystopian vision underlies “Knall,” about a hula-hoop-like fad for small cylindrical objects that serve both as personal adornments and handy, antiseptic lethal weapons. The craze can’t last, we are told, because when it comes to murder, mankind really prefers spilling, even splattering, blood. (How this comports with Levi’s own experiences amid the largest and least sanguinary killing works ever devised isn’t entirely clear.)

Among Levi’s later pieces, written after he retired from the SIVA paint factory, my favorites include “The Magic Paint,” a marvelous story Rod Serling would have appreciated. A man from Naples invents a paint that protects against all misfortune. Mixed with printer’s ink, for instance, it eliminates all typographical errors. When one Signor Chiovatero paints it over himself, its effects are even more miraculous: “All the traffic lights he came to were green, he never got a busy signal on the telephone, his girlfriend made up with him, and he even won a modest prize in the lottery.” Like many magic potions, though, it turns out to pose its own dangers.

“The Fugitive” concerns Pasquale, a man divinely inspired to write a great poem, but equally destined to lose it afterward. “Bureau of Vital Statistics” describes the rebellion of an apparatchik whose job is to fill in forms listing the causes of death for people days or weeks before the predetermined dates of their demise. (He is then reassigned to a job designing the noses of the unborn.) “Buffet Dinner” is like one of those New Yorker cartoons depicting talking animals; in this case, it’s a kangaroo at a dinner party, one at which, unfortunately, he has first to climb some stairs.

To my mind, Levi’s earlier stories are his better ones. Perhaps because their time is more precious, writers sometimes do their best work when moonlighting. But this also tracks with my own experience. I first read If This is a Man (ham-handedly re-named Survival in Auschwitz when subsequently published in the United States) in 1978, and some of the moment/images I encountered there—the walking dead in Auschwitz, known derogatorily as “Musselmänner,” or Muslims; the inmates’ band playing Schubert’s sprightly Rosamunde Overture as the work detail left—haunt me to this day. Nothing of Levi’s I’ve read since, including the ingenious and lavishly praised Periodic Table, comes close to the raw power of his indelible first book.

That, now, includes these stories, wonderful as some of them are. Still, sprinkled throughout them are the same exquisite turns of phrase, gentle but penetrating insights, and scientific esoterica—did you know that the taste and potency of wine change at low temperatures and high altitudes?—familiar from Levi’s other, more important works. And underlying them all, too, is the same indomitable spirit. It is the spirit of someone who believed, despite everything he had witnessed, and even what he might have felt, that writing something down still mattered. In his hands, it always did. And does.

David Margolick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author, most recently, of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink.