A Tranquil Star: Stories [Paperback]

Primo Levi (Author), Ann Goldstein (Translator), Alessandra Bastagli (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2008

A Tranquil Star, the first new American collection of Primo Levi previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990, affirms his position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers.

These seventeen stories, first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986, demonstrate Levi's extraordinary range, taking the reader from the primal resistance of a captured partisan fighter to a middle-aged chemist experimenting with a new paint that wards off evil, to the lustful thoughts of an older man obsessed with a mysterious woman in a seaside villa. In the title story, Levi demonstrates his unerringly tragic understanding of the fragility of the universe through the tale of a pensive astronomer, terrified by the possibility that a long-dormant star might explode and reduce the entire planet to vapor. This remarkable new collection affirms Italo Calvino's conviction that Levi was "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Holocaust memoirist Levi (1919–1987) also wrote small fiction sketches, reminiscent of contemporaries Dino Buzzatti and Italo Calvino, for periodicals, collected here and introduced by Goldstein. Of two realistic pieces that recall The Periodic Table and Survival in Auschwitz, one concerns the last minute in the life of a resistance fighter whose act against his German captors would today be called a suicide bombing. Transparent political allegories, of the kind that were fashionable in the Cold War period up to the late '60s, predominate. In the slighter of the 17 works, a miraculous paint is developed to replace lucky charms, and a Mad Max–like look at sports of the future describes tourneys conducted between men armed with hammers and cars. "The Molecule's Defiance" concerns the inexplicable spoiling of a batch of synthetic chemical, eerie in its description of a monstrous, gelatinizing mass expanding rapidly in a reactor, as though revolting against its human makers. While these pieces (published in Italian from 1949 to 1986) don't really stand on their own, they shed further light on Levi's life and work. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919–1987) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War II, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include The Drowned and the Saved, If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. He died in 1987. Norton will publish The Complete Works of Primo Levi in 2010.

Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, won the PEN Prize for Italian translation in 1993.

Alessandra Bastagli has previously translated Jurek Becker’s The Boxer. She works as a book editor in New York City.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039333161X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393331615
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,455,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, but find your own favorites among these tales, June 1, 2007

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Short Stories of Primo Levi (Hardcover)

This is between a three and a four "star" effort compared to the best of Levi already published, but it remains for those of us limited to English-language versions for Levi's work a welcome arrival on the small shelf of his writing over nearly forty years. These stories appear in English for the first time, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of his death.

This thin anthology gathers seventeen short tales--not all of them are full-fledged stories. They range from a park full of figures from literature who survive there as long as they are remembered (a conceit that has another twist in Kevin Brockmeier's recent novel "A Brief History of the Dead," also reviewed by me on Amazon) to a deadly little weapon called a "knall" to a gladiator fight pitting cars against hammer-throwing humans. Some are more fantastic, recalling Italo Calvino's fables but with more of an edgy or jaundiced view towards human weakness and unpredictable foibles. These, of the magic paint "tantalum" that works great until the user's bath time, or a kangaroo in "Buffet Dinner," or the Kafkaesque "Bureau of Vital Statistics," remind me of similar reflections collected in the earlier volume "The Mirror Maker." Tales in "A Tranquil Star" like "The Fugitive," "The TV Fans," or "The Molecule's Defiance" (great title admittedly) fall into this mode. But these, in my opinion, are not as gripping as those closer to reality, or at least allegory!

If you have come to "A Tranquil Star" without having read Levi's earlier pieces in this mode, the subject matter may seem light and inconsequential compared to the Holocaust narratives for which he is most known in English today. The introduction gives a quick run-through of which stories appeared when; they range over the whole career of Levi, and the anthology does shift in tone and topic accordingly. The earliest entry powerfully dramatizes a partisan's last minutes of life, and "One Night" hints at wartime allegory, "Fra Diavolo" sounds practically autobiographical out of Fascist 1930s Italy. But even those stories with no Italian or European mid-century setting express the author's consistent concerns. All of Levi's prose contrasts fragility vs. dominance, clarity vs. confusion, and detachment vs. annihilation all occur.

In unsparing, yet graceful and calm expression, in this volume I find these topics treated most poignantly in the title story that concludes this book, about an expanding star. As the star bursts, the story suddenly switches, to a Peruvian astronomer's thoughts as he compares the photographic plates of what seems to be the same supernova. He then wonders what he will tell his family.

The universal and the immediate collide. Here is how the fate of a planet under the star is summed up. "After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all of the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined the sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer." (160) This excerpt shows the quality of Levi's voice at its clearest, and the transparent translation that brings these stories to us marvelously rendered.

Not all the stories are flawless. "The Girl in the Book" seems to fall flat, giving us what happens in real life rather than in fiction as its conclusion, but this does not satisfy after the buildup of the tale. Levi can be a tough entertainer. He prefers to separate himself from his tales, and perhaps his rigor leaves the weaker tales here floundering once they are separated from their teller's warmth.

They tend overall towards the brief elaboration of a clever image or idea. Like much fiction of this genre, the narrative arc fades. The teller's voice forces you to listen, to see, to enter into what he describes. This is the same as the Holocaust narratives, and Levi's skill appears in fiction to be less of a craftsman of the ornate prose style, the intricate plot, or the in-depth characterization than many other modern writers. Instead, he illuminates a train forced to halt one night and then backs away after he tells you in an eerily objective voice how it and the tracks around it were completely and silently dismantled. Parts of the rambling but engaging "Bear Meat" are the liveliest pages here. He sets up a mountaineering story (and like the "element" in "The Periodic Table," I wish Levi had written more about the peaks he loved to once climb) with appealing citations from Dante in "Bear Meat" but halfway through a second narrator interjects another anecdote, and then the story stops, the two halves settling but not joined neatly.

The kangaroo's dinner attendance is recounted, but after predictable mayhem, the beast jumps away into the evening and that's that. "Censorship in Bitinia" ends up exactly where you expect--it's clever, but not profound. "The Magic Paint" switches from the discussion of "tantalum" into Fessio's fate after his glasses are coated with another substance, and the narrator then halts. This jarring assembly may be intentional on Levi's part. It does mimic our own patterns of relating stories to each other in fragments and elisions and jerks and starts and stops.

But, for those seeking elegant fables and erudite wit, these fictions (what seem to be the last ones untranslated by now, so this may account for their uneven quality as stand-alone pieces) may reveal to you a handful, among the seventeen, that will prove as memorable as to me the title story. My other finalists are "The Sorcerers" with its predicament of two smart academics unable to convey the how-tos of all the technological wonders of the First World to a tribe in remote Bolivia's rainforest, and "One Night" with its disturbing abandoned train imagery. These leave me admiring again Levi's talent.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not "primo" material, August 10, 2007

By 

Bronx Boy "bronx boy" (brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Short Stories of Primo Levi (Hardcover)

Primo Levi is one of my favorites, but this book really exposes how he has changed over time.

Divided into his earlier and later stories, the book divides pretty cleanly along those lines into classic Primo Levi and newer stuff that could easily have remained unpublished. I was especially looking forward to Bear Meat which is an elaboration of some stories he includes in the Periodic Table; it did not dissappoint. A few of the other stories were also great - the one about the captured partisan, for example. In general, however, I was not pleased with most of the stories, some of which veer off into genres that Levi does not seem at home in.

I can reccommend a few of the stories in this book that Levi fans would love to read because they complement earlier works. However, this is not a good introduction to Primo Levi and I would generally steer away from this book and towards his beautiful book The Periodic Table, or one of his many books about his time in Aushwitz.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant work from a sadly typecast author, February 25, 2008

By 

J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Short Stories of Primo Levi (Hardcover)

That Primo Levi remains the author of perhaps the finest memoir of the Holocaust remains beyond dispute. His crisp vivid prose have helped half a century of readers imagine the unimaginable, yet Levi's work extended far beyond his memoirs of the evil he endured, but unfortunately, like lodestones, those works weighted down the vast body of his writings, often obscuring them from the view of potential readers. These other works, which include poetry, short stories, and at least one novel, defy easy categorization. All sparkle with Levi's razor style. Like Calvino, Levi was a man who sought to break the bonds of convention, to communicate with the reader in a way at once intellectual and visceral. Yet for years, unless you read Italian, you were denied access to these works.

Considerable then is the debt readers owe Goldstein and Bastagli, translators of the new Levi collection, "A Tranquil Star." The stories here run the range of Levi's work, from brief tales taken from his own life, such as a story of a captured partisan ("The Death of Marinese") or a tale within a tale of mountain climbers ("Bear Meat"). Other stories show a humorous, fantastical bend, like "Censorship in Bitinia" in which a nation's censor office discovers that the "essential" process can be deleterious to health, and seek to find an animal that can carry it out and "Gladiator" about a sporting event in which pedestrians duel with cars. In "Knall" Levi offers a Calvinoesque scifi comment on society, discussing the rage for a new gadget which allows people to murder one another silently, albeit only at close range.

Not every one of these stories will grab every reader, yet all should admire Levi's effort to push the bounds of standard narrative and dig deep into the ills and foibles of the society around him. His gift for allegory and imagery were rare, and unappreciated beyond a narrow readership. With the publication of "A Tranquil Star" a great many new readers can discover this giant of 20th Century prose, and will almost surely beg for the these translators to continue their work.