Books of The Times; The Indifference of the Universe to Things Human
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
May 22, 1989
May 22, 1989, Section C, Page 18Buy Reprints
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Other People's Trades By Primo Levi
Translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
222 pages. Summit. $18.95.
''Other People's Trades'' is a collection of 43 brief essays by Primo Levi. They were prepared for publication by the author a little more than a year before he died in April 1987 at the age of 67.
According to Levi's introduction, most of the pieces were published in La Stampa, a newspaper of his native Turin, and were ''the fruit of my roaming about as a curious dilettante for more than a decade.'' But except for a very occasional truncated conclusion, there is no sign of the deadline or the ephemeral about them. They are elegantly written and elegantly translated. And they hold up.
What is most immediately impressive about them is their diversity of subject matter. The author defines them as '' 'invasions of the field,' incursions into other people's trades, poachings in private hunting preserves,'' and from these forays he brings back animals, vegetables and minerals, fire, air and water, as well as reflections on the ability of fleas to leap and beetles to fly, on the irritability of chess players, on the effect of LSD on spiders' web-spinning, on the experience of first writing on a word processor and on the pain of falling in love at the age of 11.
But one can easily write badly on a wide variety of subjects, and Levi impresses us with his gravity of mind, his attention to detail and, most of all, his ability to catch us up in his concerns. In an essay on the house where he lived all his life, he recalls the ancient mnemonic device of associating the items on a list with various rooms, and then explains why this technique wouldn't ''work in my case because in my memory all the corners of my house are occupied, and authentic memories would interfere with the chance, fictitious ones demanded by this technique.'' He then takes us on a brief and entertaining tour of those memories.
In a piece called ''A Bottle of Sunshine,'' he reflects that one sign of being human is the ability to fabricate receptacles, because to do so reflects the capacity both to think about tomorrow and to foresee the behavior of matter. This starts him on a taxonomy of containers, which leads on to the story of a friend who designed and invested in the ideal coffee-pot spout only to see it rejected by the public because it did not look traditional.
And in ''A Long Duel,'' he remembers his competitive relations with a childhood schoolmate. One challenge his rival excelled at was disrobing in the classroom under the eye of a near-sighted professor who ''never came down among the benches.''
Just as amusing as Levi's points of departure are many of the back streets he ends up exploring. A review of a book on strange data reveals that ''the current of air which runs though our nose in a normal inhalation corresponds to a number 2 wind force on the Beaufort scale.'' An essay called ''Signs on Stones'' leads to a consideration of the staying power of discarded chewing gum.
The subject of shellac reminds him of sealing wax, which in turn brings to his mind the ancient stratagem of ''writing the message on the previously shaved skull of the messenger, waiting for the hair to grow back, and then sending him off; the recipient shaved the hair and read the message.'' A piece on Iona and Peter Opie and their research into children's play reveals that the English way to call for time out in competitive games is to cry ''Barley!'' (which, incidentally, explains the nickname of the hero in John le Carre's new spy novel, ''The Russia House'').
The prevalent themes of these essays are the behavior of matter, its independence of human desires and the extent to which we project our fears onto the behavior of animals that are more or less indifferent to us. He also takes up human behavior, particularly why writers write. He offers a list of nine reasons for doing so. He expresses weariness with the obscure: ''the inarticulate is not articulate, noise is not sound. For this reason I am fed up with the praise of texts which (I quote at random) 'sound at the limit of the ineffable, the nonexistent, the whine of an animal.' I'm tired of 'dense magmatic impastos,' of 'semantic refusals,' and stale innovations. Blank pages are blank, and it is best to call them blank; if the king is naked, it is honest to say that he is naked.''
Can we divine from these pages anything deeply autobiographical? The essays frequently cite Levi's career as a chemist, from which he retired in 1977 to devote himself fully to writing. And there are references to the years he spent in Auschwitz during the latter part of World War II, about which he has written so profoundly in several of his previous books.
But of the author's mood in his last years there is little indication beyond a prevailing sense of the precariousness of all things. In the collection's final essay, ''To a Young Reader,'' he advises the aspiring writer not to ''be afraid of doing an injustice to your id by gagging it, there is no danger, 'the tenant on the floor below' will find a way to show up in any case, because writing means laying oneself bare: even the writer of the utmost propriety bares himself.''
Yet there's little sense of hopelessness in these pages, beyond an occasional intimation of an Armageddon that will leave the face of the earth to insect life. Certainly there is no hint of why the author finally chose to take his own life, except perhaps in the clarity and rationality and sheer good humor of these essays, which must for a time have served to build a wall against despair.
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A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 1989, Section C, Page 18 of the National edition with the headline: Books of The Times; The Indifference of the Universe to Things Human. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
