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ity of personal revelation: at one point, he actually says of a relation–
ship which he deliberately keeps hidden: "It is a true story, too true
for me to want to talk about it, or to be able to talk about it; at least
until I am so old that the words will come out of my mouth like
stones." And this refusal is matched by an equal unwillingness to com–
mit his perceptions to the process and the order of a genuine narrative,
an unwillingness which may be an aspect of Levi's complete fidelity
and exactitude, but with the result that much of
his
book occupies
some undefined middle ground. At times, it is the journal or diary of a
human being of the greatest sensitivity and awareness ; and at other times,
the experience which is being reported transforms itself, such is its inten–
sity and meaningfulness, into scenes which have the inexhaustible im–
plications of true fiction.
Levi does make an effort to impose a unity upon his heterogeneous
material in the figure of the uncle, Luca, and in the symbol of the
watch. Luca is the wise man who has given the protagonist a vision
of existence which arrives at affirmation through and after knowledge,
and which leads to a sense that old age may bring with it increasing joy
and truth. But convincing though he is in himself, Luca does not pull
together the other episodes, characters, and events in a dramatic gen–
eralization. He remains like the others an intermittent figure who ap–
pears, is forgotten, reappears and is forgotten again. Levi's essential
point of view is that of a bemused and helpless spectator who loves and
suffers with the beings he looks upon, and yet cannot come very close
to them. Sometimes he feels he is moving about Italy like Jonah in the
belly of the whale; sometimes "I sat on the iron seat like a spectator
who happens to be in a theater by pure chance," and at such times he
regards the Premier making a speech and this shy man looks to him
like a chrysanthemum on a dung heap; and frequently at other times,
he moves in a setting in which " the streets were deserted and my foot–
steps resounded from the fa<;ades and the courtyards like blows hitting a
hollo' ''
~ody,"
an image evoking the early Chirico. This very ambiguity
and shifting and uncertainty of the narrator's role makes for the
sharpness and genuineness of a good many passages, but it also makes
the book not a single experience mounting in meaning, but a set of
experiences superficially connected and actually separate and disparate
and without a truly illuminating relationship to each other. Neverthe–
less the power and the beauty of certain pages are so great, and the
capacity for the assimilation of experience so comprehensive that
OIL
concludes with the feeling that this may
be
the kind of a book which,
