Fantasy with a moral base

A Tranquil Star is a collection of 17 expertly translated short stories by Primo Levi, written between the 1940s and the 1980s. None has appeared in English before. They are presented by the publishers to mark the sad anniversary of Levi’s death 20 years ago; and also as a taster for a full new English edition of Levi’s complete works promised for 2011 or thereabouts. The stories belong not to Levi’s best-known vein of writing, on the Holocaust and his time in Auschwitz. This is instead the other Levi, the eclectic teller of science-fiction and fantasy tales, familiar from The Mirror Maker or The Sixth Day — with one or two echoes (such as in ‘The Molecule’s Defiance’) of the working chemist and weaver of stories of molecules and matter from that extraordinary book, The Periodic Table.

Variety is the order of the day here. The earliest story, from 1949, is ‘The Death of Marinese’, which relates with clipped power the capture of its uncertain hero by the Nazis and his decision to blow himself up with a grenade as a final act of defiance. The moral seriousness of this early effort — and a hidden concern with violence, struggle and death — remain throughout the later, more whimsical inventions. ‘The Magic Paint’, for example, plays games with science and superstition by imagining a paint that wards off bad luck, but the issue is deadly serious: worries about the morality of luck — and of his chance survival, in particular — pervade Levi’s Holocaust writings.

A persistent trick in these stories is to speak in the voice of the clerk, the brow-beaten office worker and foot-soldier of the modern world, whose very ordinariness is set against the extraordinary, fantastical situations Levi invents.