SOURCE: “Genuine Curiosities,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 1, 1989, p. 25.

In the following essay, Bailey offers a positive review of Other People's Trades.

This absorbing book [Other People's Trades] is composed of occasional essays contributed by Primo Levi to the Turin newspaper La Stampa between 1964 and 1984. Most columnists are tied to a particular subject (with the exception of that deadly species, the resident humorist), but Levi was free to write about whatever he chose. His fortunate readers were offered instruction and entertainment on a variety of topics: the complex reasons for the leap of the flea, for instance; the notion that the irritable behaviour of chess-players is akin to that of poets; the strange fact that Manzoni, as pernickety a stylist as Flaubert, is usually inaccurate when describing physical movement. In “Renzo's Fist”, Levi observes that the scene in The Betrothed where Renzo pushes his way through the threatening...