SOURCE: “Italian Fantasies,” in Chicago Tribune Books, July 15, 1990, p. 5.

In the following essay, Markey contends that Levi's The Sixth Day “can be provocative reading, less for its fiction than for the poignant insight it gives into the agonized soul of an acute observer of 20^th-Century man's precarious ‘habit of living.’”

Many of Primo Levi's American readers will be surprised when they discover that his most recently published work, The Sixth Day and Other Tales, is fiction. Americans know this Italian-Jewish author primarily for Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, books that present his stark first-hand account of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp. Fewer readers know that in subsequent years Levi also wrote fantastical stories like these.

This unfamiliarity with Levi's fiction (and with his poetry) can be partly explained by the fact that until his death in 1987, little of Levi's later...