Primo Levi's status as an essential chronicler of the Holocaust has perhaps hindered a full appreciation of his rich and subtle literary gifts. To read The Periodic Table, a book in which his year in Auschwitz barely figures, is to encounter prose whose calm beauty makes its rather ordinary subject-matter beautiful too.
The best word we have for such alchemy is style; and there is no reason to believe that Levi's style was anything but a matter of mystery to him. The mystery is only deepened by The Search for Roots, which was first published in Italy in 1981. According to a review of that original edition by Italo Calvino, reproduced here in The Search for Roots as an afterword, "Giulio Bolatti had the idea of asking some Italian writers to compile a "personal anthology": in the sense that the choices should reflect not their own writing but what they judge to be essential reading".
Levi was the first writer to deliver, but his own account of the commission is very different from Calvino's: he conceived the anthology as "a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which would bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written".
I like Levi's version much better. Yet this is a strange harvest, containing many wonders but delivering few shocks of recognition -- nothing at all on the level of style. The influence of the thirty 30 authors chosen by Levi appears to have operated on a different, perhaps even deeper level.
Levi gives headnotes to each of the pieces, and provides a chart, marshalling nineteen19 of his selections into four categories: ""Salvation through Laughter"", "Man Suffers Unjustly", "The Stature of Man", and ""Salvation through Knowledge"". This is helpful, but it cannot convey the peculiar atmosphere of the anthology.
That all thirty30 of the texts were written by men (as Levi notes) may not signify much in itself, but this is a book of writings by men about men, usually without women.
The texts that address ""The Stature of Man"" comprise a mini-anthology of boys-only adventure stories: Joseph-Henri Rosny"s prehistoric men making their pact with the mammoths; Conrad"s Marlow navigating a lifeboat to the shores of "the mysterious East"; Saint-ExupΘry trudging across the Sahara without water after crashing his plane; the captain of Roger Vercel"s Tug-Boat stoically negotiating the perils of the sea. Reading these pieces, we are reminded that the shipwreck was a controlling metaphor in Levi's writings on Auschwitz, and that the Lager was sexually segregated; yet none of these narratives seems akin to that of Levi himself, as rendered in Levi's his plain unheroic prose.
The selections that deal with war and violence are more evocative of this part of Levi"s oeuvre. Levi includes two of Babel"s savage Red Cavalry stories, a portion of Celan's ""Death Fugue"", a haunting passage from Mario Rigoni Stern"s Storia di T÷nle, and a scene from Stefano D"Arrigo"s 1975 novel, Horcynus Orca, in which a lone, unarmed German soldier is surrounded by heavily armed street children in Naples during the uprising of September, 1943.
The D"Arrigo episode is particularly brilliant and terrifying; Levi observes perfectly that the prose calls to mind ""a lens with aberrations but with enormous magnification"".
There is also a vein of broad, bawdy humour in the anthology, some of which -- in the long poems of Giuseppe Parini and Carlo Porta -- probably suffers badly in the translation. The emphasis on comic writing - Rabelais and Sholem Aleichem are also present -- comes as another surprise; there is no exemplar here of Levi's own quieter and more intellectual humour.
The life of the mind is represented mainly through writings on science. There are good selections from Lucretius, Darwin, Sir William Bragg and Arthur C. Clarke, but none of these texts has the coruscating universality of Levi's own writing on chemistry, and this is probably a measure of Levi's status as a pioneer: The Periodic Table helped to inaugurate an era in which the possibilities of science writing (to say nothing of autobiographical writing) seem wider, and more implicated in the whole of human life, than ever before. Which brings us back to the idea of style as alchemy. In chemistry -- alchemy married to modern scientific understanding -- the end product often bears no resemblance to the ingredients.
In the same way, a plant's leaves and flowers rarely resemble its roots. Levi, of course, understood these things very well, and might have suspected (as he appears to hint in his preface) that to undertake a ""search for roots"" by presenting a handful of texts as indicative of the bridge between ""what has been read and what has been written"" is, for a stylist so fine, a doomed enterprise.
But while this anthology begs more questions than it answers, and cannot solve the mystery of style, it also reinforces our sense of Levi's glorious singularity.
Brendan Barrington is the editor of The Dublin Review