SOURCE: “‘Official Science Often Lacks Humility’: Humor, Science and Technology in Levi's Storie Naturali,” in Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, edited by Susan Tarrow, Center for International Studies, 1990, pp. 112-26.

In the following essay, Klein analyzes the defining characteristics of Levi's Storie naturali.

“Nothing, ever, is for free: everything has its price.” 

(Storie naturali)

Primo Levi's third book, written under the pseudonym of “Damiano Malabaila,” was published for the first time in the fall of 1966 by Einaudi. Storie naturali is a collection of fifteen short stories which represent the beginning of a new course in the author's narrative. After the autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz of 1947 and his second book of 1963 The Reawakening—both dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath—Storie Naturali (“Natural Stories,” not yet published in English)¹ represented such a break in the literary pattern established by Levi up to that point, that the...