678
PARTISAN REVIEW
ruse intentionally; it is simply the remains of one of my many abor–
tive building attempts .... " Again, the reverberations of simply
digging a house in the ground open the vista of a lifelong quest for a
safe life and the fear of ever accomplishing it that fills the entire story
with a dual sense of paranoia and normal activity.
This is not the sensibility or the achievement of a minor writer.
In fact, Kafka was one of the modernist precursors of a fiction that
does not abandon narrative but at the same time does not surrender
it to the realism of the nineteenth-century novel and its debased
popular versions today. Kafka's realism, like that of Proust and
Mann, told a linear story but not one that pretends to capture the
surface of everyday life. In this respect , Kafka has been a model for
writing in the modernist and experimental tradition that has not for–
saken traditional narrative . As Andre Gide once remarked : there is
no reason why a slice of life cannot be vertical rather than horizon–
tal . The example of Kafka also might be at least one answer to the
seemingly endless debate about whether modernism is dead .
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
WHO KILLED PRIMO LEVI?
THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED. By
Primo Levi. Summit Books.
$17.95 .
After completing this last book, at the age of sixty-eight ,
Primo Levi committed suicide. We will never know whether he did
so because it had been too painful to relive once again his dreadful
past, or because he despaired of ever teaching all but a few the
lessons of the Holocaust. In
Survival in Auschwitz,
first published in
1947 , his experiences had poured out of him; he had "expelled
them." After forty years, after writing also
The Reawakening, Moments
of Reprieve, The Periodic Table,
If
Not Now, J.1Ihen?,
and a collection of
short stories,
Other People's Trades,
he stepped back to examine,
among other things , the fruits of his labor. Levi undertook this final ,
detailed analysis of the unique convergence of forces that made
Auschwitz possible - in order to prevent their recurrence. Both his
fictionalized accounts of survival in the Lager and the more strictly
