A Tranquil Star

Where does one go creatively after experiencing, and writing about, Auschwitz? It took many years and a brilliant memoir (THE PERIODIC TABLE), but in most of these uncollected fictions Levi enters a world of magical realism in which life and death seem chance occurrences and foreboding mixes with delight. Bureaucracy, in particular, falls under a heavy mallet. Chickens act as censors; a petty official fed up with inventing causes of deaths is demoted to determining the shapes of newborns' noses. David Colacci narrates with just the right balance of irony to capture the author's seriocomic tone. Two caveats: Short as most of these stories are, they carry over between discs, interfering with the narrative flow, and a lengthy afterword seems wholly unneeded. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

February 19, 2007
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.