FOUND IN TRANSLATION: "THE MAGIC PAINT"

Primo Levi Magic Paint To mark 50 years of Modern Classics, Penguin publish 50 Mini Modern Classics: pocket-sized but, with authors from Joyce to Barthelme, big on ambition and ideas. This slim volume of stories spans the decades of Primo Levi’s writing life. Magic paint kills an “unhappy and blameless victim” in a Mengele-type experiment, while the German-named knall is a modish weapon which is psychologically lethal: people “resist each other like magnetic poles”. In “Gladiators” the Roman joust is now a sadistic fight between man and machine, with crowds eagerly betting on the outcome. One girl has no time for her partner’s “silly humanitarian excuses”. Levi said that his life was marked by two events—being sent to Auschwitz, and writing about it—and the later, absurdist stories bear the scars of his pen. “The Fugitive” evokes the sad ineffability of inspiration: a poem grows legs, flees its creator, and disintegrates. But is it worth it? We cannot know what legacy, if any, we leave. In “The Death of Marinese”, Levi’s take on “Inglourious Basterds”-style wish-fulfilment, the hero thinks he blows himself and his captors up in vain—but the abandoned Nazi truck is then captured by partisan forces. Levi surely identified with the shunned hero of the last tale: the writer is the perennial outsider. Yet he lives on, as this new edition shows. Less self-pity, more hard struggle, and the world would have more Primo Levis.

"The Magic Paint", published by Penguin, and translated from the Italian by Translators Ann Goldstein, Alessandra Bastagli, Jenny McPhee is out now

~ JAKUB FIGURSKI