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Primo Levi's AlchemyDon't read the Holocaust into everything he wrote.

By Ruth FranklinPosted Monday, April 9, 2007, at 11:44 AM ET

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Normally Arrigo has no trouble coming up with appropriate demises for his subjects ("everyone knows what happens to a man who races motorbikes"), but suddenly, faced with the card of an 8-year-old girl, he has a breakdown. The story's conclusion finds him reassigned to lighter work in "a small office in the attic of the building, in charge of determining the shape of the noses of newborns."

In an interview with Philip Roth, Levi asserted that "there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement." Throughout his life, he wrote stories that he referred to as "science fiction," which he meant quite literally—fiction about science. The most evocative stories in this collection read like laboratory reports from an alternate universe. "The Magic Paint" plays on Levi's experience in the paint factory where he spent his career. A man challenges the company to copy, from a sample, a paint that purports to protect its user from bad luck. Analyzing it, the narrator discovers that it contains the element tantalum, "a very respectable metal, with a name full of meaning, never before seen in paint, and thus surely responsible for the property that we were looking for." (In fact, tantalum is known for being highly resistant to corrosion and heat, and so the plot of the story turns on this scientific joke: What if tantalum were so resistant that it could even resist misfortune?) The new version works: A colleague who tries it out finds that "all the traffic lights he came to were green, he never got a busy signal on the telephone, his girlfriend made up with him, and he even won a modest prize in the lottery." But then the narrator remembers an old schoolmate, cursed with bad luck, whom he invites to try the paint. When they examine him in the lab, they discover that he has, literally, the evil eye: His gaze is capable of corroding steel. So, they coat his glasses with the paint, but when he puts them on, he drops dead, his eye having "instantaneously reflected that thing which he could no longer transmit."

A story like this one would be unforgettable no matter who the author was—Borges, Primo Levi, your next-door neighbor. Yet the fact that these stories are by Levi—and that, it seems safe to assume, no one reading them will be unaware of the author's own story—makes it almost impossible to resist reading A Tranquil Star in precisely the way I previously dismissed as misguided. Despite my best intentions, when reading about the paint that wards off evil, or a rogue molecule whose defiance symbolizes "the prevalence of confusion over order, and of unseemly death over life," or—in another extraordinary parable—of the "knall," a weapon that causes instant, bloodless death but "has not, so far, become a danger to society," I was unable to stop thinking about Levi's experiences during the Holocaust and what they might mean for these fables about evil. Is "The Fugitive"—the tale of a writer whose poem literally grows legs and runs away from him—a parable of the elusiveness of the muse? Or is it a cry of despair at the lack of control a writer has over his words once they are committed to paper and out in the world? (Levi said that after returning from Auschwitz, he had an insurmountable urge to tell his story to anyone who would listen, but he was deeply wounded when his books were attacked or misunderstood.) Could "Buffet Dinner," which describes (in marvelously allusive terms) the discomfort of a kangaroo at an elegant party, actually be an allegory of the survivor's futile attempts to integrate himself into a society where he will be forever ill at ease?

Maybe so. But if these readings are psychologically plausible, in a literary context they are ridiculous. Not every piece of writing can be expected to bear the weight of the Holocaust, and to load these stories down with such an impossible freight risks damaging their delicate humor and intelligence. Levi offers a hint at his intentions in another piece in this collection. Titled "In the Park," it depicts a theme park of literary characters, including "five or six Cleopatras … they can't stand each other," and Dante's beloved Beatrice, who is, as she would have to be, "unbearable." Needless to say, this world is so impractical as to be nightmarish: The doctors are all either antiquated or corrupt, and there are no plumbers, electricians, or mechanics. Instead, there is a surfeit of explorers, cops and robbers, musicians, poets, and prostitutes. "In short, it's better not to seek here an image of the world you left," the narrator is told. "I mean, a faithful image: because you'll find one, yes, but multicolored, dyed, and distorted." Even this literary joke has a real worry at its heart: that literature, even at its best, is a deeply flawed representation of the world. Yet it also offers a consolation. Fiction, understood on its own terms, has its own pleasures. Why demand from it more than it wants to give?