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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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052989
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05298900.064
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1990-09-22
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BOOKS, Page 86Acute Agility
OTHER PEOPLE'S TRADES
by Primo Levi
Translated by Raymond Rosenthal
Summit; 222 pages; $18.95
Did you know that there are more than 350,000 species of
beetles on earth (J.B.S. Haldane once observed that God "is
inordinately fond of beetles"), and that there may be at least 1
million more that nobody has yet identified? Or that one species
eats only roses and another only snails? Or that yet another can
imitate the light of a female firefly so exactly that when a male
firefly comes to mate, it gets eaten?
Well, now you know, because these were among the more than
350,000 thoughts floating around inside the head of the late Primo
Levi, and a good number of them have been crystallized in this
engaging posthumous collection of essays. For most of his life Levi
was known mainly for having written one of the very best Holocaust
memoirs, a thoughtful and kindhearted account titled Survival in
Auschwitz. At the end of his life, in 1987, Levi was in the
headlines again, for having leaped down the stairwell of the
apartment house where he had lived since birth. Whether this
despairing act occurred because the scars of Auschwitz were too
terrible to endure or whether Levi suffered from manic-depressive
syndrome, nobody knows. He writes here, concerning two German poets
who committed suicide, that "the obscurity of their poetry (is) a
pre-suicide, a not-wanting-to-be"; and about his own writing, by
contrast, that "I have an acute need for clarity and rationality."
There are no further clues here as to why this distinguished life
ended the way it did.
Levi was a professional chemist, manager of a paint factory in
Turin until he retired at 58 to write, and so he writes from a
scientific perspective and with a scientist's precision. But he
was also a humanist, a lover of poetry, and these brief essays
demonstrate the remarkable range of his interests, from children's
games to the genius of Rabelais to the dissatisfactions of playing
chess against a computer to the question of why butterflies are
considered beautiful. And his mind is agile. When he discovers that
the framework of a crinoline gown in the Kremlin museum contains
a tube that used to be filled with honey to catch stray fleas, he
reflects on how the flea learned to jump 100 times its own length.
Some people mistrust collections of essays on the ground that
they are often fragmentary and monotonous, but it is precisely the
diversity of Levi's pensees (artfully translated by Raymond
Rosenthal) that makes them so entertaining. That and the basic
quality of Levi's mind, skeptical but sympathetic, a bit melancholy
but witty; one feels that he is a friend. About all those beetles,
Levi speculates that they may be the creatures destined to take
over the postnuclear world. "Many millions of years will have to
pass," he writes, "before a beetle particularly loved by God. . .
will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that
energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the
velocity of light." It is a prospect that nobody else could have
imagined.