A Tranquil Star: Stories - Softcover

Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian chemist and writer, best known for his memoirs If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table.

Ann Goldstein, the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi and the award-winning translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels, is a former editor at The New Yorker.

Alessandra Bastagli is the translator of Primo Levi's stories in A Tranquil Star and his essays in The Complete Works. She lives in New York.

In "Bureau of Vital Statistics," for instance, a frustrated man reports to his office for what appears to be an ordinary clerical position, until we slowly realize that his job is to assign causes of death to people on Earth. In "Gladiators," a woman reluctantly agrees to join her boyfriend at a popular sporting event -- where the "sport" consists of pedestrians dueling against cars. "Knall" describes a consumer craze for a pocket-sized gadget that instantly and silently murders people, but only at point-blank range.

Each of these stories is only a few pages long, and perhaps it's best to reveal as little about them as possible, so as not to ruin the reader's delight upon discovering the moment when the surreal finally saturates the real.

For another writer, this sort of "punch line" approach to plot might become little more than a gimmick. But the cumulative effect of these stories -- each written in the same elegant, unpretentious prose that defined Levi's memoirs -- is to make one wonder about the prevailing philosophy that brought these many imagined worlds into a single mind. And as one reads, that philosophy becomes clear. In each story we are introduced to a twist on our world that is, on closer examination, not really a twist at all. The shocking elements of these stories are precisely the points where they correspond to our own world: the sick spectacle that we make of brutal violence, the casual possibility of murder based on whim, the systems of terror and war that knowingly set the causes of others' deaths.

As a collection of nearly all of Levi's previously untranslated fiction, this book does include the occasional tale in which inanity trumps insight.

But the most poignant stories here are those that deal with the act of writing itself, and in particular its failure to meet the expectation of immortality. As the narrator relates in "The Fugitive," about a poem that physically eludes its author's grasp, "To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives." Levi has been granted this gift of destiny, and American readers now have the gift of rediscovering it.

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