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A persistent trick in these stories is to speak in the voice of the clerk, the brow-beaten office worker and foot-soldier of the modern world, whose very ordinariness is set against the extraordinary, fantastical situations Levi invents. So, in ‘Censorship in Bitinia’, the censorship offices of a small statelet are run first by people, then by machines, and finally by chickens (the story is signed off with a footprint); or in ‘Bureau of Vital Statistics’, Arrigo is responsible for assigning all manner of deaths to individuals due for imminent demise, their names passed to his desk on frayed index cards.
The clashing of cultures and of categories also fascinates Levi. A kangaroo mingles at a society party in ‘Buffet Dinner’. Cars fight in the bull-ring in ‘The Gladiators’. In a mock-anthropological tale, ‘The Sorcerers’, two Western ethnographers are trapped in a tribal village in South America and find that they have nothing to show their hosts of the ‘magic’ of their modern world. Every technological wonder they try is either exquisitely useless or impossible to stage in the Bolivian jungle. Literature and reality also rub up against each other in interestingly self-conscious ways. The protagonist of ‘In the Park’ finds himself in a sort of literary afterlife where fictional characters live out their lives, cluttered together in comic close-quarters, for as long as they are remembered in the real world. As their fame fades, though, they find themselves literally fading away into thin air. (This story really needed its companion piece, called ‘Creative Work’, to fully make sense.)
Levi always wrote most naturally in short forms — articles, essays, poems and stories — rather than in sweeping grand narratives, and, for this reason, the collection feels just right. Each story has a small kernel to it — a turn of phrase, a memory, a fantastic invention, a strange meeting — which jolts or moves or raises a smile. If anything, their impact is heightened by the slightly unpolished or uneven way Levi shaped out his stories; he never was a professional littérateur. The title piece, ‘A Tranquil Star’, spends five pages discussing ancient astronomy before squeezing the actual story — about a working astronomer, with a job and family to worry about, as much as imploding stars — into one brief, poignant page.
A Tranquil Star taps nicely into unknown corners of Levi’s oeuvre. These wry, witty and often mutedly moving stories are a welcome addition to the canon of a remarkable writer.
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