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Understanding and Not Understanding Beno Weiss’s Understanding Italo Calvino and
Nicholas Patruno’s Understanding Primo
Levi are the only two volumes (out of 26 thus far) dedicated to Italian
writers in the series Understanding Modern European and Latin American
Literature. General editor James Hardin of the University of South Carolina
Press explains that the series is intended for “(American) undergraduate and
graduate students and nonacademic readers” who read in translation and seeks
to “emphasize sociological and historical backgrounds” and to “explain the
complexities of contemporary literature lucidly” (Weiss viii; Patruno ix). Both Weiss and
Patruno give readers careful and complete readings of all of the major texts
of two of Italy’s most important writers in the second half of the twentieth
century. Weiss, however, is more successful than Patruno in treating his
author in a manner appropriate to the goals of an “Understanding Literature”
series in his precise discussions of both the larger historical and cultural
contexts in which Calvino worked and his ability to provide lucid
explanations of literary complexity. Patruno, although he is excellent at
giving synthetic accounts of Levi’s narratives, seems less successful in
treating Levi’s literary brilliance and complexity in a manner useful for
graduate students and sophisticated general readers. For any
“Understanding Modern World Literature” series, Italo Calvino is obviously
one of the first among the usual suspects rounded up by a police commissioner
series editor trying to fill his prison cells with Criminally Complex
European Authors. And Beno Weiss gives Calvino a careful third-degree in
treating his fiction in its various and multiple historical, political,
social, intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. He also
performs the very valuable service of not only assembling a complete bibliography
of Calvino criticism but also making direct references at appropriate points
to many of the essays contained in it. In his bid to make
Calvino understandable, Weiss decides to cleave Calvino into two. In his
first five chapters, we have Calvino the speculating politically-engaged
intellectual for whom both realistic and fantasy fiction are vehicles for
examining the fate of the individual in the newly emerging post-war Italian
(and world-wide) society. In Chapters Six to Eleven, we have Weiss’s Other
Calvino: the game-playing experimentalist who dips his quill in the French
literary theory inkwell and spatters his pages with abstract analysis of the
cosmos, of storytelling, of reading and writing, and of observation and
analysis themselves. Weiss’s initial chapter
“Life and Circumstances” is a short account of the author’s biography. Weiss
emphasizes that the enigmatic life of the “timid, solitary (Calvino) who
stuttered, spoke haltingly and felt ill at ease and awkward in society” (1)
is difficult to relate to the author’s fiction and other works. In his almost
non-existent biographical introduction, Weiss tells us mostly about the
intellectual circles in Turin, Paris, and Rome that Calvino moved in during
different periods of his life. In the next two chapters, Weiss discusses the
“neorealistic path” to literature that Calvino trod on and gives a lucid
account of how The Path to the Nest of
Spiders, the novelette I giovani
del Po, and the short story collections of the 1950s (Ultimo viene il corvo, I racconti—including the Marcovaldo
stories) relate to the partisan struggle and to post-war societial crises in
Italy. Weiss is also careful to point out that Calvino’s predilection for
fantasy fiction is clearly evident in the author’s “neorealistic” phase. In his
discussion of the Nest of Spiders,
Weiss reports Pavese’s famous comment about the “Ariostesque flavor” of
Calvino’s first novel and his inclination to create worlds of “fantasy and
freedom.” In discussing Calvino’s early short stories, Weiss continues to
emphasize that social-realistic and fantastic elements are interwoven. He
concludes this section with a fine extended discussion of the Marcovaldo
stories (now in Marcovaldo), which
an approving and applauding Weiss sees as an important achievement of
Calvino’s artistic maturity. Weiss sees Marcovaldo as a particularly
successful character and writes: Marcovaldo, the
Italian little tramp, is clearly a favorite of Calvino, who always presents
him wittily, with great affection, commiseration, and admiration. The author
always inserts a note of pathos that makes the hero not only amusing but
endearing to younger and older readers alike. (33) Chapter Four contains
an ample treatment of I nostri antenati
trilogy (The Cloven Viscount, The
Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight) seeking above all to remind
readers that in a reversal that amounts to the same thing, Calvino’s
“Ariostesque” fantasy fiction is closely related to what is going on in the
world (the Cold War) and even in Calvino’s life (“One cannot help but argue
that there is a clear similarity between the young Baron’s flight into the
trees and Calvino’s own break with the Italian Communist party,” 50). But
Weiss’s main emphasis is on Calvino’s sundered, fanatical, or nonexistent
heroes and at the end of the chapter the author makes some interesting
observations on Calvino’s play with “the artefice of writing” and on
Calvino’s way of searching for the truth through Hegelian negativity: “If we
assume that an idea is true—for example that Medardo and Agilulfo exist—then
we encounter the opposite, its contradiction” (64). In Chapter Five, “The
Speculating Intellectual at the Crossroads: Four Novellas,” Weiss continues
his heroic and sad tale of Calvino and his protagonists’ struggles in an
incorrigibly corrupt and degraded world. Heroes such as the unnamed
first-person narrators of The Argentine
Ant and Smog as well as Quinto Amerigo in a Plunge into Real Estate, and The
Watcher. In speaking of these novellas, Weiss is drawn to a reflection on
loneliness as Calvino’s overarching theme: “If Italo Calvino’s writings share
a theme, it is loneliness. All his narratives pit the individual against the
group as well as against nature . . .” (86). In Chapter Six, the
chapter on the Cosmicomics, Weiss
begins his treatment of the Other Calvino with a fine, long section playfully
entitled the “French Connection.” Weiss is making it clear that to understand
40-something Calvino, one needs extensive knowledge of “innovative literary
trends.” He emphasizes the importance of Alfred Jarry and especially of
Raymond Queneau: . . .
Calvino’s post-1963 approach to literature can be traced in significant
measure to Queneau’s models—his interest in science and its effect on our way
of thinking, the application of science and mathematical concepts to
literature, the search for new literary forms, the combinatory and playful
nature of writing. (93) In
the rest of this chapter and in the next one as well, Weiss goes on to
analyze a selection of the Cosmicomical tales with special attention to the
figure of narrator-protagonist Qfwfq. He concludes Chapter Six with an
interesting discussion of the importance of the spiral metaphor in Calvino
and in Chapter Seven he reads the title story of “The Memory of the World”
section in Borgesian and Derridean terms as a tale that helps us understand
how the meanings of signs can be “perverted,” especially in a late
twentieth-century world in which “we are surrounded by a multitude of
subverting signs, icons that distort completely the truth and ultimately
condition our self-image as well as every conceivable aspect of our life”
(127). Chapter Eight deals
with The Castle of Crossed Destinies
and Invisible Cities and refers us
to Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” concept and to Calvino’s own
lecture on “Cybernetics and Ghosts” as the key theoretical points of
departure for the weary textual voyager. Weiss’s account of the genesis of
the two “novellas” (The Castle of
Crossed Destinies and The Tavern of
Crossed Destinies) that comprise Castle is very lucid and illuminating.
In his discussion of Castle, he centers on the Narrator’s Tale “I also try to
tell my tale.” In analyzing Cities,
he deals with how the cities first described in a “positive vein
. . . become places of vice, decay and man’s wanton
self-destruction” (152). Weiss gives us Calvino’s famous characterization of
Invisible Cities as the text “in
which I managed to say most” (159) and asserts that the book is an ideal
example of a kind of perfect “lightness” of the sort theorized in one of
Calvino’s Memos for the Next
Millennium. Chapter Nine contains
a close reading of If on a winter’s
night a traveler—and provides a solid interpretation of this “novel about
novels” (167) that centers on the frame story involving the Lettore,
Ludmilla, Silas Flannery, and Ermes Marana—and on “Calvino” and on the
empirical reader as well. He sees the text as paradigmatically postmodern
and finds Calvino’s postmodernism more constructivist than deconstructive.
Weiss states: With [the]
conclusion Calvino shows that there is after all meaning in fiction, and that
not every literary text collapses or destroys itself when subjected to
literary analysis or when reduced to nothing but codes, patterns or language.
(184) After a brief
treatment in Chapter Ten of Under the
Jaguar Sun and La Strada di San
Giovanni, Weiss concludes his book with a study of Mr. Palomar that also seeks to draw some general conclusions
about Calvino’s fictions. He finds a “Nietzschean pathos of distance” (209)
and the thematics of incompleteness and disability as recurring elements in
Calvino that find their most complete expression in Mr. Palomar. Weiss is somewhat disturbed by some aspects of the
Other Calvino’s production and in his last chapter, makes a number of his own
negative pronouncements (“Calvino leaves us at times unsatisfied
. . .,” 203; “The later Calvino is not always successful in
bringing his abstractions into the range of our personal sensory experience,”
204) and supports them with statements by whining (no, I should say
“wining”) critics such as Enzo Siciliano, who complains that a typical late
Calvino narrative becomes a “recipe book of itself . . . offer[ing]
the menu as the meal rather than food itself, and instead of wine the wine
list, perhaps embellished with the most beautiful imaginable colors” (206).
Looking at Calvino’s post-63 production makes critics like Siciliano and
Weiss nostalgic for the vintage 50s Calvino they adore, and in his last
chapter Weiss cannot help reiterating his high praise for Marcovaldo
“unquestionably a compassionate and lyrical account of a family’s struggle
for survival in the modern city” (205). Although Weiss argues his case
against the later Calvino with skill, I find his (hostile police
commissioner) bias somewhat unexpected in a book in a series whose raison d’être is to explain—and
presumably develop an appreciation for—“the complexities of contemporary
literature” (viii). But in final analysis Weiss tempers this negativity by
emphasizing that Calvino’s “perceived weaknesses” do not diminish his overall
achievement. In his admirable final-page list of the defining elements of Calvino’s
fiction, Weiss includes “subtle humor and ironic wisdom, the urgency of his
playfulness, his keen fantasy, his unsparing zest for combinatorial games,
his persistent quest for new forms and ideas, his sense of wondering and
adventure” (213). Nicolas Patruno
begins his contribution to the Understanding
Modern European and Latin American Literatures series with an general
introductory chapter in which he discusses Primo Levi’s birth as a writer. If
Calvino is the writer with no biography, Primo Levi is the writer who has
biography thrust upon him: a European Jew’s biography he would never have
desired or sought on his own. In his introduction, Patruno immediately makes
Jewishness the starting point for treating Levi’s writing. He argues that
Levi “had little reason to reflect upon his Jewishness” (1) up until his
graduation with a degree in chemistry from the University of Turin. He
describes the circumstances under which 6,400 Jews in Nazi-occuppied Italy
were deported to death camps and how Levi was sent to Auschwitz in February
of 1944. In describing how Levi’s deportation to the Auschwitz/Monovitz camp
and his improbable survival “shocked” him into confronting his Jewishness,
Patruno feels himself beginning to call Levi an exclusively Jewish writer.
This induces him to quickly stop himself and caution that “it would be
inaccurate to label [Levi] a Jewish writer in the narrow, ethnic sense of the
word” (3). He cites a 1985 remark of Calvino’s that Levi is a writer with an
“encyclopedic vein” and makes reference to the “fusion of Primo Levi’s scientific
mind with his literary creativity” and his acknowledgment of the importance
of a dialogue between “creative art and scientific disciplines” (3). After the
introduction, Patruno divides his study into seven chapters, the first five
of which are dedicated to Levi’s narrative works (Survival in Auschwitz, The
Reawakening, The Periodic Table,
The Monkey’s Wrench, If Not Now, When?), the sixth to the
essay collection The Drowned and the
Saved, and the final one devoted to Levi’s “minor” stories and essays. In
Chapter One, Patruno defines Survival
in Auschwitz as a book written to “remind humankind of the Holocaust so
that it will never happen again” (8) and also as Levi’s “attempt to liberate
himself from the psychological burden imposed by having survived this great
offense against humanity” (8). After noting and approving of Philip Roth’s
protest against the English title change from “If This Is a Man” (a literal
rendering of “Se questo è un uomo”) to “Survival in Auschwitz,” Patruno goes
on to give an excellent summary of Levi’s most famous book, dividing Survival in Auschwitz into three
parts: (1) the early chapters up to “This Side of Good and Evil” are the
beginning that reports directly and chronologically; (2) the key middle
chapters “The Drowned and the Saved” up until “the Last One” where the author
emerges as personal protoagonist; and, finally, (3) the diary-style ending in
the last chapter “The Story of Ten Days.” In his very complete account,
Patruno discusses all the major characters, and his paragraphs on Jean il
Pikolo, Alberto, and Lorenzo are especially persuasive. For example in
speaking of Lorenzo, Patruno writes: Miraculously,
Lorenzo comes along just when everything seems to grind to a standstill.
Lorenzo is the personification of unconditional goodness, and he will remain
one of the author’s most memorable figures. (24) Patruno’s
main emphasis in his Survival chapter
is indeed on Levi’s triumph over evil and over the threat of madness posed by
loss of humanity: “the models these men [i.e., Jean, Alberto, and Lorenzo]
provide are vital in enabling the author to regain his place in the
rationally functional world” (24). In discussing Levi’s
second work The Reawakening (La Tregua 1962) (whose title change
from “The Truce” he again disapproves of), Patruno tries to delineate a basic
contrast between Levi’s first two works: The Reawakening
is less structurally compact that Survival
in Auschwitz because its form is designed to enhance an uninhibited
description of the changes the author-character undergoes as he reenters
society. (30) After
this rather weak introduction in which the basic difference between Levi’s
first two books is not really explained, Patruno gives another complete and
engaging summary of all the major events and characters of The Reawakening. Here again he is especially
good in pointing out Levi’s need to see good in others to be sure he still
has it in himself. Patruno says that Mordo Nahum, the Jew from Greece (“il
supergreco”), and Cesare, the crafty Roman Jew, are the two key characters.
About Mordo Nahum, he says: This Greek of
mythical stature has reawakened sentiments of an unusual kind of friendship,
contempt, respect animosity and curiosity and has indeed earned the honor of
being called Levi’s mentor. (38) As
he describes the various phases of Levi’s journey through Poland and Russia,
he aptly points out Levi’s continuing outsider status with respect to the
Yiddish culture of the large majority of Holocaust victims. Patruno makes a
very interesting comparison between the description of the scene in which two
Polish Jewish girls say Levi “is not Jewish” when they find out he cannot
speak Yiddish and the scene in Survival
in which Levi had watched as an outsider the “ritual of lamentation” of the
Gattegno family in the Deportation camp at Fossoli near Modena: “The
Gattegno’s ritual and the author’s encounter with the Polish girls are
prefaced by lyrical nocturnal scenes that are strikingly similar” (45).
Patruno goes on to give colorful and interesting accounts of the passage
through and sojourn within the vast spaces of Russia, the ex-prisoners’ gaze
upon devastated Germany (that gives some “consolation” but is at the same
time “hollow”) and the encounter with American soldiers who eerily remind
Levi of Nazis. At the end of the chapter Patruno is careful to emphasize the
nightmarish aspects of Levi’s return and the persistence of the concentration
camp memory. He cites Levi’s note on an Italian school edition of The Reawakening that the Concentration
Camp “becomes the symbol of the human condition and is identified with
death” (53). In Chapter Three (The Periodic Table) and Four (The Monkey’s Wrench), Patruno’s
character descriptions and plot summaries do less than justice to both his
subject in general and in particular to the context of an “Understanding
Modern Literature” series. In explaining the encounter between Science and
Literature in The Periodic Table,
Patruno is unable to go beyond unenlightening platitudes such as “The time
had arrived for Levi to devote himself fully to his writing and to
synthesize the scientific and artistic aspects of his character” (57);
“Moreover his training in chemistry played a critical role in the emergence
of his clear and concise writing style” (57); “The two disciplines are
blended here to the point at which the success in one corresponds to the success
in the other” (57). Here Patruno would have done well to follow Weiss’s
methodological principle of carefully citing and discussing other critical
work on The Periodic Table.[1] The author also seems aware of the
importance of considering The Periodic
Table as an autobiograhy in which Levi’s mature ironic consciousness
emerges—but on these issues, as well, there is no satisifying illucidation.
Rather, the author thinks it sufficient to continue his summaries discussing
characters and stories in relation to each of the 21 elements Levi chooses
as the starting points for his autobiographical fictions. To be sure, Patruno
is quite good at this—especially when the subject is the Holocaust and his
accounts of how Levi’s praise of impurity (mixed matter) in chemical
compounds is an attack on the racial laws, how in the “Iron” chapter Levi
“galvanizes the iron embodied by his good friend (fallen partisan Sandro) and
preserves his memory” (62) and especially in the Vanadium chapter where he
effectively retells the story of Levi and Muller, the chemist he had known at
Monowitz and how Levi feels that “as long as Muller has no remorse and no
intention of repenting, there can be no real “meeting” between the offender
and the offended” (76). He also gives a good account of Levi’s “shy and
charming interaction with Rita” (60) continuing his insightful study of the
importance in Levi of recurring descriptions of unfulfilled relations with
women. But on the whole, as Patruno takes us through the narrative (again
divided into 3 sections: [1] Argon-Nickel [formative period]; [2]
Phosphorus-Cerium [Auschwitz period]; [3] Chromium-Vanadium [postwar period]
with the Carbon chapter serving as a general philosophical conclusion), he
consistently fails to probe the text’s depths giving us only phrases such as
“The problems, difficulties compromise and enjoyments of Levi’s family are
those that most families experience during the course of their existence”
(59). “Through his depiction of his relationship with Giulia, which lasted
as a friendship for many years thereafter, Levi suggests the role that fate
and luck play in our lives” (66). “Freeedom is as valuable as Gold itself”
(67). In this chapter, the discussion of the key “Argon” and “Carbon”
chapters are especially cursory and seem to me missed opportunities to
confront key aspects of Levi’s literary art and his mature method of writing
about life, chemistry, and writing. Patruno’s problems
continue in Chapter Four on The
Monkey’s Wrench. He calls this text an important work in Levi’s development
as a writer, his first one after leaving chemistry in which he not without
trepidation becomes a Man of Literature at age 55. In his initial remarks
Patruno shows he is aware of The Monkey
Wrench’s complexity, calling it “more technically experimental” than most
of Levi work and noting the “invention and humor” displayed through careful
use of a dialect-flavored language and “recollections . . . shaped
as parables” (80). But again he fails to probe these aspects of the work in a
satisfying way. At one point he discusses how Levi begins many vignettes in The Monkey’s Wrench with “zoom lens
precision”: Levi catapults the
reader into the middle of the intimate discussion taking place between
Faussone and his listener [within the text], creating immediacy and literary
tension. This technique enables the reader to follow the conversation more
closely. Also evident is Levi’s skill at reproducing dialogue. (82–83) But
just how these effects are created is not explained at all. Patruno sees Levi
as emphasizing the impact of free choice, the importance of the work ethic
and again the differences and similarities between literary artists and
scientists. He also discusses at length narrator Faussone’s uncertainties
about his storytelling ability and Levi’s own doubts about the limitations of
literary expression. Patruno’s discussion of this theme is again unsatisfying
in drawing too simple a contrast between “the relative objectivity” of
science and literature that “thrives . . . on the variety of
interpretations” (84). Here it would be very useful for Patruno to make a
reference to literary texts like Calvino’s If On a Winter Night a Traveler that play with the limitations of
literature and find themselves inevitably showing that literary texts do
convey stable meanings—at least about the nature of uncertainty. Patruno
might also show more awareness that even the “relative” objectivity of
science today is under attack. Patruno ends Chapter Four with a discussion of
how the book’s “poignant disclosures about Faussone and his father” call to
mind a consideration of “Levi and his own father, demonstrating the author’s
increasing clarity regarding his Jewishness” (89). But just why this is so
is in no way explained. In Chapters Five and
Six, in returning to Holocaust material, Patruno rebounds with an excellent
discussion of Levi’s historical novel If
Not Now, When? and The Drowned and
the Saved essay collection. Patruno sees an encounter during Levi’s long
return to Italy (described in The
Reawakening) as the seed of Levi’s decision to write a novel about a
heroic group of courageous Eastern European Jewish partisans, “which Levi
clearly conceives as a composite representation of the Jewish race” (91).
Patruno also asserts that the novel is also “powerful response” to “those who
have questioned the behavior of Jews during the Holocaust” (92). Further, he
sees the novel featuring a group of Yiddish-speaking Jews as an attempt by
Levi to enter into the world of Yiddish culture, thus finally overcoming his
feelings of “discomfort” and “embarassment about his inability to speak
Yiddish” (92). Patruno centers his account of the novel on the figure of the
clock maker Mendel, Levi’s alter-ego protagonist whose name is a short for
“Menachem” (“the consoler”). He notes that when Levi has Mendel say “But I’ve
never consoled anybody” (If Not Now,
When? 21), he is making, in part, a despairing personal statement.
Patruno points out how Mendel’s essence emerges clearly in his relationship
with the brooding Leonid and how Leonid scrutinizes Mendel’s weaknesses and
self-delusion. In describing the band of partisans that Mendel and Leonid
join in the central portion of novel, Patruno emphasizes the importance of
the women partisan Line and Sissl. Line is the fierce, strong,
“self-directed” self-preserver who overshadows her opposite Sissl, a gentle,
calm woman. He also discusses the importance of Gedaleh their leader, “a poet
and musician whose art, symbolically and literally has saved his life from
the discord and destruction around him” (100). The author sees the “If Not
Now, When?” song (whose text is derived from a book of famous sayings of
ancient rabbis) as the clear turning point in the story when the group
clearly conceives of their mission as fighters and seekers of vengeance
against the enemies of the Jews: “It is no longer a question of being my
brother’s keeper, goes the refrain but of taking a stand for each Jew who has
suffered” (103). Patruno goes on to describe the band’s journey westward
through Europe and the key episodes such as the liberation of the
concentration camp, the murder of “Black Rokhele” at Neuhaus and subsequent
revenge-killing of the notables of the small town, and the trip to Italy and
arrival in Milan. Throughout, Patruno maintains a clear focus on the importance
of language, frequently citing Levi’s use of Yiddish and Hebrew terms such as
the Hebrew palindrome VNTNV (“And they will give back”) that the partisans
write on the wall of the concentration camp as a replacement to the “Arbeit
Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”) inscription that the Germans had cynically
written over the gates of Auschwitz (rather than the honest statement “Tod
Macht Judenrein—Death Makes Us Free of Jews”). In Chapter Six, really the
book’s climactic one, Patruno turns to The
Drowned and the Saved calling it “perhaps the most psychologically
incisive of all Levi’s Holocaust works” (111). Here again he is very lucid in
his summary of the major themes and his quotations from Levi are always right
to the point. He discusses Levi’s remarks about oppressors and victims and
their thought processes in the initial essay “Memory of the Offense” and then
explains how in the long, second essay “Gray Zone” Levi shows how in their
“most demonic crime . . . the Nazis destroyed not only their
captives’ bodies but also their soul” (117) by placing the “onus of guilt” on
victims such as those chosen for the Sonderkommando squads forced to haul
dead bodies of murdered Jews from the gas chambers to the crematoria. In his
remarks on the succeding chapters—especially “Shame” and “Intellectuals at
Auschwitz”—Patruno is very good at conveying Levi’s own sense of survivor’s
guilt and shame and sense of “emptiness and disillusionment,” and he gives
the clearest and most carefully-argued account I have seen of the case that
Levi’s final text may well show that the author’s survivor’s “dilemma
continues to plague him perhaps to the point of leading him to commit
suicide” (122). Patruno also mentions Levi’s despair at the fact that the
horror of the Holocaust “has not made any great impact in the long run on
those who were not victimized by it” (138). A statement such as this seems
(to me at least) an invitation to enter into the murky and troubling waters
of the controversy over the uses of the Holocaust in Israel and in particular
the controversy—emerging in just these years—over what some Israelis (notably
Rabbi Yehosua Leibowitz) began to call “Jew-Nazi” (in Hebrew: “Yehudi Nazi”)
treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. But here again Patruno seems
uninterested in larger perspectives. He concludes the chapter with an
interesting though not entirely convincing interpretation of how Levi’s use
of Dante’s phrase “perilous waters” (“cicqua perigliosa”) (Inferno I, 24) can be taken as a sign
of the triumph of despair in Levi. He sees this reference to Dante is
diametrically opposed to the famous reference to Dante in the “Canto of Ulysses”
chapter in Survival in Auschwitz. After the
emotion-charged chapter on The Drowned
and the Saved, Patruno concludes with a calm, short chapter “Stories and
Essays: Levi’s Minor Works” in which he devotes most of his attention to the
“Stories naturali” and “Vizio di forma” sections of the The Sixth Day and Other Tales
collection. Patruno sees these stories as cautionary tales about “how the
advancement of modern technology can contribute to the creation of a
defective moral climate” (151). While both Beno Weiss
and Nicolas Patruno have given us fine overviews on authors they genuinely
appreciate and admire, it seems to me that Weiss’s book, Understanding Italo Calvino, provides a better service to
readers with its far more complete bibliography and the author’s much
greater interest in larger theoretical perspectives. Weiss indeed will be a
great help to all readers whose invisible path and cosmicomical destiny lead
them to Calvino’s castle of quintessentially twentieth-century European
fiction—in any season in the city or of their life. But in emphasizing
Patruno’s limitations in his Understanding
Primo Levi, I should be mindful of contemporary literature’s love of
reversing hierarchal classifcations: I should therefore make it clear that it
is quite possible that text-centered Patruno is the more careful critic and
that Weiss and I who prefer his approach may well be the misguided ones.
Maybe Patruno’s decision to avoid Sophisticated Theory and The Burgeoning
Bibligraphy (instruments, after all of the power of the arrogant careerist
literature professor commandant) is the correct one. In Levi, maybe it is
only plot character and theme that matter. That and only that is what makes
Levi’s uniquely meticulous, urgent writing on the Holocaust such a great
gift to Twentieth-Century World Literature. Loyola
University Chicago Works Cited Dante Alighieri. La Divina Commedia. Ed. Umberto Bosco
and Giovanni Reggio. Florence: Le Monnier, 1979. Motola, Gabriel.
“The Language of the Scientist.” The
Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 34.2
(1991): 203–10. Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia: U
of South Carolina P, 1995. Peterson, Thomas.
“The Art-Science Conjunction in Primo Levi’s Periodic Table.” Nemla
Italian Studies 11–12 (1987–88): 143–50. Schehr, Lawrence.
“Primo Levi’s Strenous Clarity.” Italica
66.4 (Winter 1989): 429–43. Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia:
U of South Carolina P, 1993. |