A Tranquil Star

by Primo Levi Narrated by David Colacci

Overview

A Tranquil Star, the first new American collection of Primo Levi's previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990, affirms his position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers. These seventeen stories, first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986 and translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, demonstrate Levi's extraordinary range, taking the reader from the primal resistance of a captured partisan fighter to a middle-aged chemist experimenting with a new paint that wards off evil, to the lustful thoughts of an older man obsessed with a mysterious woman in a seaside villa. In the title story, Levi demonstrates his unerringly tragic understanding of the fragility of the universe through the tale of a pensive astronomer, terrified by the possibility that a long-dormant star might explode and reduce the entire planet to vapor. This remarkable new collection affirms Italo Calvino's conviction that Levi was one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile

Where does one go creatively after experiencing, and writing about, Auschwitz? It took many years and a brilliant memoir (THE PERIODIC TABLE), but in most of these uncollected fictions Levi enters a world of magical realism in which life and death seem chance occurrences and foreboding mixes with delight. Bureaucracy, in particular, falls under a heavy mallet. Chickens act as censors; a petty official fed up with inventing causes of deaths is demoted to determining the shapes of newborns’ noses. David Colacci narrates with just the right balance of irony to capture the author’s seriocomic tone. Two caveats: Short as most of these stories are, they carry over between discs, interfering with the narrative flow, and a lengthy afterword seems wholly unneeded. R.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169900316
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/20/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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