"A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi

"A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi is one of those books one picks up at a bookstore mainly due on the strength of the author.  I must confess that what interested me the most about it was the tantalizing fine print on the cover: "unpublished stories."  My experience with Primo Levi was strictly limited to non-fiction, primarily his holocaust books "Survival in Auschwitz" and "The Reawakening."  The cover flap insde "A Tranquil Star" bills the stories as newly translated into English (the first effort since 1990).

The stories follow a chronology and they depict the early conventional narrative style and the more experimental one later on.  "The Death of Marinese" and "Censorship in Bitina" build up and resolve quite conventionally with the draw, pitch and conclusion of stylistic narrative.  Since I had never read any of Levi's fiction, it was hard to detect a specific stylistic voice to them; they could have been written by anyone.  The later stories reflect a more experienced Levi, one that has honed his craft and created his own narrative voice.  The stories "Gladiators," "Fra Diavolo on the Po" and "The Girl in the Book" force the reader to suspend certain levels of disbelief much in the same way that "magic realism" does in the literature of the Latin American boom.  In "Gladiators," Levi offers the readers the tale of warriors doing battle against automobiles in vast arenas, and in "The Girl in the Book" he offers a tale of surrealist quality, blending temporal and symbolic elements nicely.

Often times, readers are hesitant to observe narrative/stylistic qualities of specific writers when the works are translated.  This can be a very tricky and misleading belief.  Although my Italian is limited to the extent of my fluency in Spanish, I looked up the originals in Italians to make comparisons on specific passages that initially felt odd.  I can say with confidence that both Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli did an amazing and miraculously job translating these.  Not only did they capture the full meaning of the stories, but inasmuch as the "early" and "late" stories are concerned, they were able to capture the development of Levi's style with both precision and clarity.  This is probably the most difficult thing for a translator to do and they both pulled it off flawlessly.

Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami's new novel, "Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage," suffers from a long title, one hard to remember and difficult to convey to bookstore attendants (unless they are familiar with Murakami's work).  The novel, however, proves to be as good as any of Murakami's great ones and, in addition, explores new themes of complex issues and does so with a mixture of the real and the metaphysical.

The novel follows the protagonist, Tsukuri Tazaki, sixteen years after being ostracized from a group of friends from high school.  There were five friends, two women and three men but in his narrative Tsukuri insists that the relationships were based on keeping the balance of the unit as a whole.  Sexual tension, he explains, or any other type of female/male relationship was out of the question.  As a master craftsman, Murakami shapes a story that leads the reader in interpretative directions that are not obvious but rather unconventional.  He doesn't mislead.  He's the professional provocateur offering the reader the opportunity to discover what is real or implied or both.  That tension, after all, is precisely what destroys the friendship circle and the source of Tsukuri's emotional turmoil.

There are some typical Murakami "tricks" in the novelistic bag, but for the most part, the novel is fresh and with a twist of psycho-analysis.  That is not to say Murakami hasn't employed these tools before, but here he does so in new ways.  For example, the protagonist develops a friendship with a college student just a couple of years younger than himself.  The homoerotic overtones are there, subtle but clear.  Nevertheless, Murakami disimisses the conventional, and the homosexual relationship occurs in a place where neither the reader or the protagonist can determine for sure.  That's the genius of Murakami's mastery of the metaphysical world, a world where disembodied yet real events occur, where the blend of time and space is mesh so perfectly it becomes an additional puzzle to the narrative structure.  Another example is the use of "color" in the names of the characters, and the symbolic/meaning behind the protagonist's own name.  This is on the more conventional level of experimentation, but still works as a whole and I enjoyed it wholeheartedly.

In the end, the story works as a "hero-gone-on-travels-to-discover-truth.  The experienced Murakami reader will delight on the new twists and turns, but the inexperienced Murakami, the reader bent on conventional structures or neatly packaged resolutions will no doubt have problems with the novel.  As I have described his work before, Murakami is best understood if looked at as if you were stepping into a Salvador Dali painting and fell right into an Alice in Wonderland practical joke of sorts.  If the psychoanalytical or travels into the metaphysical do not interest you, this novel (as much of Murakami's other work) is not for you.  For me, however, it is always a pleasure to read new works by my favorite authors (Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami) in those rare occasions when they both publish books only months apart from the other.