Customer Reviews

The Monkey's Wrench (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I finished this book and read it all the way through again less than a month later. There are lots of things to like about it. Mainly, though, I like it because it conveys a sense of joy in work, in writing, in the less spectacular aspects of life that can be as much a source of happiness as can the great gifts that come along once or twice in a lifetime. And the stories are told in such an engaging way you don't really realize Levi is showing you a way to make life bearable. The sad thing is that Primo Levi apparently couldn't do for himself what he did for so many of his readers.

I also like that though a good part of the novel takes place in the former Soviet Union, Levi, with the exception of one chapter in the book, says nary a word about communism. The Soviet regime is, for the purpose of his book, completely irrelevant. Lesser writers would have stuck to the "one-man-against-the-regime" template.

That said, I do have some gripes, mostly to do with the translation. Levi has been very badly served either by his translators or, more likely, by his American publishers. Why this book was called _The Monkey's Wrench_ is beyond me. There's a wrench, and there's a monkey all right, but there's nothing so patently ridiculous as a wrench belonging to a monkey. _The Wrench_, plain and simple, like Levi's prose, would have sufficed.

There are some people who you can never hear enough of. Levi is certainly one of those. He combines one of the greates talents as a writer in this century with a wisdom uncommon for any age.

This book is not an adventure story in the typical sence of the word, but reading it is an adventure, and I for one am a better man for having opened its covers.

I don't think that Levi has ever written a book that I would only read once. This book, I look forward to revisting many times over. The maximum length of this review is one thousnd words. If all those words were supperlatives, I would not come close to doing this book justice.

Excellent series of vignettes/stories generally related within the novel by a crane/derrick rigger to the author, a chemist. For those with no inclination to industrial engineering and chemistry, this book makes the two subjects seem interesting, and uniquely identifies them with the human condition. Quite beautiful.

First, this book is not about Nazi. Second, this author is not an artist( he's more and less than that).

This writer is not the straightforward creator who sits in his living-room thinking about life and all; he started to write inspired by pain and suffering. That means his works are always a struggle to grasp the poet and entertaining side of art, while being unable to reach it.

This novel is awesome. It says work is one's life and happiness. All this through the eyes of a travelling chemist admiring a manual and intellectual worker. It should please every one who needs to have a different and more constructive, while human, view of work. I strongly suggest you to buy it. Then send me your opinion.

Primo Levi forges a stunningly eloquent creative execution that reveals the joys of living, of work, of responsibilities and not least of storytelling. The book is consistently verging on the comic at every turn shunning the tragic buoyancy of the pathos that life imposes on her victims. but here victims find ways to stagger the routines with an indomitable will that reveals the grandeur of the human spirit. This is indeed an exhuberant, wildly funny novel that coils magic abreast the mesmerizing tales of a construction worker, who full of life and sheer bewilderment for the ecstasy of being alive and the adventures that we wield and construct as we perform our most converntional exploits. Libertini Fussone, the character in question, has been justifiably pronounced a kin to Zorba, a worldy self-educated philosopher. He has built bridges and towers in India, Africa, Alaska and Russia. His love of work and travel is sustained by an enviable penchant for finding circumstances and situations that transcend the norms of facile relatioships and recognize beauty glowing in people and places that magically trace the absurd in the most passion driven haunts of the mind - yet it is here that we find the meaning of our lives. The narrator, a chemist as was Levi, swaps stories with the construction worker, and in fact it is his most extraordinary telling of how he saved his Italian paint factory from economic disaster at the hands of a Russian anchovy canner that brings laughs while eradicating our most grounded expectations. Faussone will tell us of a monkey who wanted to be a man, of a magnificent machine that caught stardust, of a girl who drove a bulldozer and affected, rather moved him more than anyone or anything else.
His Holocaust trilogy (Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and Moments of Reprieve are indispensable for they describe the human condition with such resiliency and awesome wisdom that they make us better human beings through our encounter with his talent. But here, in The Monkey's Wrench we become acquainted with the beauty and joy of being, the experience that because it lacks meaning admits and betrays a surplus of wondrous meaningful stories.

Meet Faussone, an able tradesmen who sets up cranes around the world and enjoys his work. Most of the several short stories in the book centre on him recounting some interesting job he's been involved in. 
 
Rather than remain invisible and let 'Faussone' do all the talking, the listener/narrator is also allowed to take on a role - the stories are clearly placed in a setting of Faussone talking to the semi-autobiographical persona of Levi. We learn a little of why he's putting down these stories, his own speculation on whether writing is a worthy 'craft' compared to that of the tradesman, and he even drops in a work story of his own (as a chemist - Levi himself was a chemist) to conclude. Levi highlights the importance of the listener and the context to the stories, which, while entertaining enough to stand on their own, are enhanced by tangents of setting and response. Moreover there's room for just a little plot and relationship development winding alongside the stories.
 
As close as I can think of are the James Herriot stories, although I suspect some of Levi's fans would be a bit horrified at the comparison. That being said, I suspect 'Herriot' himself would have enjoyed the book. Levi's stories, however, are not nearly as formulaic (or as funny), and Levi is a more able painter of characters that feel more authentic, and don't necessarily need to be pigeon-holed. Amusing that Faussone feels more authentic than some of Herriot's doubtless 'real' recollected characters: in a postscript Levi says,
"Faussone is imaginary but "perfectly authentic," at the same time; he is a compound, a mosaic of numerous men I have met, similar to Faussone..."
 
There's a grace there as well - which some would find bland - this isn't sensationalist fiction with a sting or a belly laugh. Levi does have an agenda - to suggest that a worker who takes pride and pleasure in his trade is as good a subject (and hero) for a novel as any super spy or renegade cop or tortured academic or whatever. There's also an acknowledgement of giving some praise to Levi and Faussone's fathers in this, so perhaps he can be forgiven if his picture is a bit eulogistic.
 
The 'wrench' (if the translation got this right) isn't just a symbol of blue collar labour, it's also the wrench between the metaphysical profession of writing books and that of actually making tangible things. The 'Levi' of the stories is struggling with this, and Faussone's parting advice to him is:
"...I tell you, doing things you can touch with your hands has an advantage: you can make comparisons and understand how much you are worth. You make a mistake, you correct it, and next time you don't make it..."
and earlier 'Levi' speculated that perhaps so many writers have bad stress because they can't test their work with a level or a gauge, and are working blind half the time.
 
So, if you're in the mood for something reflective, diverting, and well written - go ahead. If you're after some action or melodrama, wait for another mood.

Delightful conversation between two men talking shop-one from the white collar world, and the other blue collar. Those looking for 20th century profundities will be disappointed. Those who understand what work is, and how it can be ennobling, will find a real treasure.

What could be more attracitve? Here's a book about travel in countries all over the globe, and it's made up of conversations between two practical men of the world. A theme--engineers construct things, authors construct stories--ties the chapters together.

A great idea, but, alas, one that has been turned into a dreadful book. We're warned in the very beginning that the speaker might, at times, be a bit imperfect: repetetive, full of himself, prone to get lost in details. But the first chapter shows him, despite these short-comings, to be fascinating. Nonetheless, in the chapters that follow, he turns out to be every bit as insufferable as we'd been told in that first page.

Each chapter is filled with mind-numbing details of construction projects, only relieved, at times, with brief passages that are more interesting. Levi's book does justice neither to world travel nor to Italian literature.