A Tranquil Star
Authors: Primo Levi
A TRANQUIL STAR
Unpublished Stories
TRANSLATED BY ANN GOLDSTEIN
AND ALESSANDRA BASTAGLI
PENGUIN CLASSICS
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
O
THER
WORKS BY
P
RIMO
L
EVI
Survival in Auschwitz
The Reawakening
ShemÃ
The Periodic Table
If Not Now, When?
Moments of Reprieve
The Monkey's Wrench
The Drowned and the Saved
Collected Poems
The Mirror Maker
Other People's Trades
The Sixth Day and Other Tales
The Search for Roots
Report from Auschwitz
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
by arrangement with Giulio Finaudi Editore 2007
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2007
1
Stories selected by Ann Goldstein
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007
English translations copyright © Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, 2007
English translation of “Censorship in Bitinia” copyright © Jenny McPhee, 2007
The moral rights of the translators and introducer have been asserted
English translations of the stories “Bear Meat” and “A Tranquil Star” first appeared in
The New Yorker
.
English translation of the story “Knall” first appeared in
Harper's
.
The present edition includes short stories selected from the following works by Primo Levi:
Storie naturali
, published in 1966;
Vizio di forma
, first published in 1971, second edition published in 1987
with a letter from the author;
LilÃt
, published in 1981;
Pagine sparse 1946â1980
and
Pagine sparse 1981â1987
, which first appeared in
Opere I
and
II
, published in 1997.
Storie naturali
,
Vizio di forma
, and
LilÃt
, are also collected in the volume
Tutti i racconti
,
edited by Marco Belpoliti, published in 2005.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Dates of Original Italian Publication
Primo Levi is known to English readers mainly for his writings on the Holocaustâ
Survival in Auschwitz
and
The Truce
âand for the autobiographical
Periodic Table
. Yet he was a prolific writer of stories and essays; he had, he once recalled, been writing poems and stories even before he was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. His first efforts when he returned to Turin included both poems and stories, in addition to what he was writing about his experiences in the concentration camp; and he continued to write stories until his sudden death, in 1987. This new book of stories, the first untranslated fiction of Levi's to be published in the United States since 1990,
*
is intended to introduce readers to a Primo Levi who may be somewhat unfamiliar to them.
T
HE EARLIEST
story in
A Tranquil Star
, “The Death of Marinese,” dates from 1949, when Levi was virtually unknown as a writer, and was first published in
Il Ponte
, a liberal-socialist journal based in Florence that had published a chapter of
Survival in Auschwitz
two years earlier. It tells of a captured partisan who, as he is being transported in a truck to prison, decides to set off the grenade in the belt of a German soldier guarding him. In the space of a few pages, Levi re-creates the suffocating sensation of capture, the feverish yet clear-headed state of mind, the sharp hatred of the Germans, the weary intensity of despair that lead to Marinese's act. The story may have been based on an account that Levi had heard, but there is at least a grain of personal experience. Levi had joined a partisan group in the fall of 1943 and was almost immediately captured himself; on the bus that was transporting him to prison, he writes, in the chapter “Gold,” in
The Periodic Table
, he had the thought of pulling the cord on the grenade of a German soldier with his back turned to him, butâunlike Marineseâhe didn't have the courage.
“Bear Meat,” the second story here, was published in 1961 in
Il Mondo
, a political and literary journal based in Rome. It, too, is a story about foolhardiness and courage, but utterly different from “Marinese,” in its expansive storytelling and cast of characters, its complex format (the double narrator and the story within a story), mountain setting, and overtly moralistic tone. The mountains and mountain climbing were important to Levi, and the story recapitulates some of his own experiences. In a 1984 interview he said, “I began
going up into the mountains when I was thirteen or fourteen. In my family there was a tradition of seeing the mountains as a source of strength.⦠Not mountaineering as such, no climbing rockfaces.⦠You just went up into the mountains.” Levi did not write other stories of this type, nor did he ever include this one in a collection, perhaps because of its singularity; however, the second part, the story of the character called Carlo, appearsâwith the character's actual nameâ in the “Iron” chapter of
The Periodic Table
.
“Censorship in Bitinia” was published the same year as “Bear Meat,” in the same journal (and then in Levi's first Italian collection,
Storie Naturali
). Short and satirical, without characters, it makes a sharp contrast to “Bear Meat.” Bitinia (a made-up country), Levi tells us, has a problem finding qualified people to do the work of censorship; one difficulty is the job hazards, which may include “various sensory system troubles,” such as “exaggerated reactions to certain colors or flavors, which regularly develop, after remissions and relapses, into serious psychological anomalies and perversions.” Levi describes the various solutions, keeping the slightly detached, almost deadpan tone of the reporter. The story seems to have been inspired by the Christian Democratic politician Mario Scelba, who served as Interior Minister and Prime Minister in the nineteen-fifties and was known for his rigid suppression of dissent, especially on the left.
The two remaining stories in
Part I
of this volume, “Knall” and “In the Park,” were written between 1968 and 1970, and published in the Italian volume
Vizio di Forma
. In a letter to
his publisher about the stories he was writing in the sixties, Levi says that he is trying to give form to a perception he has of “an unraveling in the world, a breach, large or small, a âdefect of form' that annihilates one or another aspect of our civilization or our moral universe.” In the story “Knall,” for example, he invents “a small, smooth cylinder, as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier,” which comes “solid-colored, gray or red” or “in wrappers printed with revoltingly tasteless little scenes and comic figures.” The purpose of this harmless-sounding device (its popularity is compared to that of the hula hoop), presented as a sort of toy, is, it turns out, to kill. Yet the tone remains light and conversational, and the details are from ordinary life; for example, the idea that displaying a knall on one's person is “de rigueur” in certain circles, or that its use has spread without any help from the media.
