Acute Agility

By Otto Friedrich

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.