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La Chiave a Stella by Primo Levi
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La Chiave a Stella (1978)

by Primo Levi

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8831424,102 (4.05)5
This is not a book for journalists. Civil servants, too, will feel uneasy while reading it, and as for lawyers, they will never sleep again. For it is about a man in his capacity as homo faber, a maker of things with his hands, and what has any of us ever made but words. I say it is 'about' the man who makes; truly, it is more a hymn of praise than a description, and not only because the toiler who is the hero of the book is a hero indeed - a figure, in his humanity, simplicity, worthy of inclusion in the catalogue of mythical giants alongside Hercules, Atlas, Gargantua and Orion. He is Faussone, a rigger' Bernard Levin, THE TIMES… (more)
Member:acqua
Title:La Chiave a Stella
Authors:Primo Levi
Info:Einaudi (date?), Paperback
Collections:Your library, Currently reading
Rating:****
Tags:"italian literature"

Work Information

The Wrench by Primo Levi (1978)

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English (10)  Italian (4)  All languages (14)
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Short, work-place vignettes that read together could form an homage to labor, work, if one chooses to read them that way. Levi, the chemist, and a fellow Italian rigger swap tales. Mostly we hear the rigger, working abroad on one massive project after the other. ( )
  kcshankd | Jul 13, 2023 |
Così così. Struttura rigida e ripetitiva (ogni capitolo un racconto), caratterizzazione del personaggio Faussone un po' troppo piatta ed eccessiva, mancanza di vere riflessioni sul cambiamento del lavoro in quegli anni. Nell'insieme, piuttosto freddo. ( )
  d.v. | May 16, 2023 |
review of
Primo Levi's The Monkey's Wrench
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 24, 2016

This review is cut off midway. read the whole thing here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/463747-primo-levi?chapter=1

I got interested in reading something by Primo Levi when I was preparing for an international Skype conference that I was coorganizing called “Лiмpolysemiя (Limpolysemia)”. Since the event revolved around my friends in the us@ & the Netherlands interacting with Monty Cantsin's friends in Minsk in Belarus I was researching Belarus, a country I knew next to nothing about.

I got media out of the public library relevant to the subject & that included Davide Ferrario's movie "Primo Levi's Journey" about this Italian author's post-release-from-concentration-camp ordeals as he traveled thru Europe trying to get back to Italy. Part of Levi's travels took him thru Belarus & the movie showed the Belarus contemporary w/ the movie's making.

I knew next to nothing about Levi's writing so I was glad to find something by him. I didn't have any particular expectations. As it turned out, I found this to be genius. In my GoodReads bk categories there's one called "Working Class Intellectuals". I'm in there, as is the author of the great Australian bullock-driver novel Such is Life, Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy). Levi will be in this select few too. From my perspective, that's a great honor but Levi's dead so he won't get the chance to appreciate that.

The Monkey's Wrench is mostly stories about working told to the author's stand-in by a guy described on the back of the bk as a "construction worker". Actually, "construction worker" doesn't really do it. In the bk he self-describes as a "rigger" but I'd like to know what the original Italian is. Having worked construction myself & having worked w/ riggers, it seems to me that "ironworker" might be closest to describing the guy's skills. Even so, he's no beginner ironworker, he's tops in his field.

This particular worker is in demand all over the world - so the stories have a wonderful range of locale. In one case, he circumspectly describes where a job was by saying:

"["]You know: a country where if you steal something they chop off your hand in the square, left hand or right, depending on how much you stole, and maybe an ear, too, but all with anesthetic and topflight surgeons, who can stop the bleeding in a second.["]" - p 9

Now, of course, for most of my life I've 'known' that getting a hand chopped off for stealing is an Arabic thing. To say that this is overkill is an understatement. I always thought that Arabs ate w/ one hand & wiped their ass w/ the other & that the hand cut off wd be the eating hand so that the 2 functions wd be performed by the shit-wiping hand. I have no idea whether that's actually based in truth or not or whether it's some racist slur or whatever. SO, I asked the online Gods: "where are hands chopped off for stealing?" & that yielded some pretty nasty results:

"Hudud (Arabic: حدود Ḥudūd, also transliterated hadud, hudood; singular hadd, حد, literal meaning "limit", or "restriction") is an Islamic concept: punishments which under Islamic law (Shariah) are mandated and fixed by God. The Shariah divided offenses into those against God and those against man. Crimes against God violated His Hudud, or 'boundaries'. These punishments were specified by the Quran, and in some instances by the Sunnah. They are namely for adultery, fornication, accusing someone of illicit sex but failing to present four male Muslim eyewitnesses, apostasy (opinion is not unanimous on this crime.), consuming intoxicants, outrage (e.g. rebellion against the lawful Caliph, other forms of mischief against the Muslim state, or highway robbery), robbery and theft. Hudud offenses are overturned by the slightest of doubts (shubuhat). These punishments were rarely applied in pre-modern Islam.

"These punishments range from public lashing to publicly stoning to death, amputation of hands and crucifixion. The crimes against hudud cannot be pardoned by the victim or by the state, and the punishments must be carried out in public. However, the evidentiary standards for these punishments were often impossibly high, and were thus infrequently implemented in practice. Moreover, Muhammad ordered Muslim judges to 'ward off the Hudud by ambiguities.' The severe Hudud punishments were meant to convey the gravity of those offenses against God and to deter, not to be carried out. If a thief refused to confess, or if a confessed adulterer retracted his confession, the Hudud punishments would be waived.

"In most Muslim nations in modern times public stoning and execution are relatively uncommon, although they are found in Muslim nations that follow a strict interpretation of sharia, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudud

Now that's the relatively unsensational article. The 1st Google hits are all about ISIS, today's boogeyman, cutting off hands in public. Now, to be fair, there is a website titled "Common Misconceptions About Islam, Muslims and The Quran". This website includes the following:

"The male thief, and the female thief, you shall mark, cut, or cut-off their hands/means as a recompense for what they earned, and to serve as a deterrent from God. God is Noble, Wise. Whoever repents after his wrongdoing and makes amends, then God will relent on him. Truly, God is Forgiving, Merciful. [5:38-39]

"The above verses are commonly translated to mean physical cutting off the thief's hand or hands, however whilst this understanding is a theoretical possibility, when all the information is reviewed it is only one of several possibilities, hence the above translation. Firstly, it should be noted that the verse makes clear whoever commits theft but repents after and makes amends, then this is acceptable to God, thus no punishment can be administered in this case. This of course would only apply to those who do this before they have to be tried and found guilty." - http://misconceptions-about-islam.com/cut-off-hands-theft.htm

NOW, I've sd it before & I'll say it again, "God" is a myth created by unscrupulous people to justify all sorts of crimes. "Divine Rights" was used by Christinanes to justify imperialism & slavery. Muslims are using God to justify all kinds of horror. I'm an atheist & I've never killed anyone. If I ever do I don't think I'll be saying "God told me to" or "The government told me to". I think there's more integrity in saying "I hated that piece of shit" or whatever. Take responsibility people.

Anyway, the point is that both Christinanity & Islam, the 2 biggest gangs in the world today, are originally desert religions. In a desert, resources are limited. Stealing something might be a much bigger deal than taking a piece of meat from a supermarket in middle-class America. But cutting off a person's hand?! Even in a desert that strikes me as excessive - unless MAYBE the theft directly results in another person's starving or something like that. The problem here is that this desert mentality is then applied to the rest of the world, wch, in case you haven't noticed, isn't a desert. Unfortunately, if the Christinane & Islam have their way, the rest of the world will be a desert w/ a bunch of megalomaniacal patriarchs terrorizing anyone who doesn't agree w/ them. Watch yr asses, folks, religion is not harmless. END OF DIGRESSION.

In the same story, a curse is used for labor purposes. I wdn't've thought of that one.

"There had been two or three strikes, and the boss hadn't yielded an inch, because business was slow anyhow. Then there was the idea of getting physical with him, if you follow me. To get even.

""What do you mean by getting physical?"

"Faussone patiently explained that it was like putting a curse on someone, giving him the evil eye, a spell. "Maybe not to kill him. On the contrary, there they surely didn't want him to die, because his little brother was worse than he was.["]" - p 11

Faussone's stories about rigging as told by Primo Levi's avatar deeply impressed me w/ their loving technical details. These are stories told about work by someone who actually knows what he's talking about & the descriptions are utterly wonderful. I've never read anything about work so beautifully written before:

"When the bottom of the frame was on the base, we sent the smaller crane home, and the big one stretched its arm out all the way, with the tower dangling from it, and little by little it straightened up. And even for me—and I've seen my share of cranes—it was a beautiful sight, also because you could hear the engine purring calmly, as if to say for him too, it was child's play. It lowered its burden right on the spot, with the holes right on the bolts, and we tightened them, had a drink, and went off." - p 17

Levi's stories are convincingly told from the POV of someone who knows his shit & loves being able to make difficult jobs go right. Of course, all sorts of tantalizing details come to light:

"On the other hand, of he cared to know, I could give him some information about the origin of the name. Mr. Derrick, a man of parts, conscientious and devout, lived in London in the seventeenth century and for many years was hangman for their Britannic Majesties, he was so conscientious and so enamored of his profession that he constantly pondered ways to perfect his instruments. Toward the end of his career he developed a new model gallows, a tall, slender tower, thanks to which the man hanged, "High and close," could be seen from a distance. This was called the Derrick gallows, and then, more familiarly, derrick. Later the term came to cover analogous structures, all in trestle form, destined to humbler uses. In this way Mr. Derrick achieved that special and very rare form of immortality that consists in the loss of the capital letter at the beginning of one's surname: an honor shared by no more than a dozen illustrious men of all time." - p 31

The reader is referred to Errol Morris's documentary entitled "Mr. Death".

In one story an ape, interchangeably referred to as a monkey, gets interested in the ironworker's job & starts to imitate him & the ironworkers imitates the ape as well:

""He was curious. He used to come and watch me work, and first thing he did, he showed me something. I told you, it rained all the time: well, he sat down to take the rain in a special way, with his knees raised, his head on his knees, and his hands clasped over his head. I noticed how in that position he had his hair all slicked downward, so he hardly got wet at all: the water ran off his elbows and his behind, and his belly and his face stayed dry. I tried it myself, taking a bit of rest between bolts; and I must say that if you don't have an umbrella that's the best solution."" - p 33

I reckon every job involves some complaining & Levi has Faussone do a good job of that too:

""Hmph, maybe I got kind of sidetracked by the details, but I swear it was a crazy job. First of all, I don't like to say it, but the local workers were all dopes: maybe they were good at swinging at hoe, but I wouldn't swear to that, either, because they seemed more in the loafer category; they were reporting sick every minute. But the material was the worst: the bolts you could find there, first there wasn't much assortment, and second they would make a dog vomit." - p 41

Comparing the writer's job to the ironworker's:

"I had to grant him that to work sitting down, in a heated place and at ground level, is quite an advantage; but, aside from this, assuming I could speak in the name of actual writers, we have our bad days, too. In fact, we have them more often, because its' easier to see if a piece of metal structure is "right on the bubble" than a written page; so you can write a page with enthusiasm, or even a whole book, and then you realize it won't do, that it's a botch, silly, unoriginal, incomplete, excessive, futile; and then you turn sad, and you start getting ideas like the ones he had that evening, namely you think of changing jobs" - p 48

The Italian version of this was 1st published in 1978 so I found the following somewhat precocious:

"Sure, I'm young still, but I've been in some tight spots and it was always because of oil. They never find oil in great places, say at San Remo or on the Costa Brava. Not on your life. It's always in lousy, godforsaken places. The worst things that happened to me happened because they were looking for oil. And, to tell you the truth, my heart wasn't even in it, because everybody knows, after all, that the stuff id about to run out, so it's not worth the trouble." - p 54

Think of all the trouble around oil in the ensuing 38 yrs!

One of Levi's writerly touches that I like is the way he has his character describe something in terms of the environment evoked as visible to the speaker but not to the reader:

"Weell say that one was twenty meters high, and it seemed pretty high to me; but this one. not even finished, lying there, was two hundred and fifty meters long, like from here to that green fence over there, like from Piazza Castello, to give you an idea." - p 57

Faussone has a revolutionary philosophy born out of the practical common sense gleaned from having to deal w/ practical matters of some complexity:

"["]And if governments worked the same way, then there wouldn't be any need of armies in the first place because there wouldn't be any need for wars, and the people with common sense would work everything out."

"The way people think when they venture to spout opinions outside their own field! I tried cautiously to make him aware of the subversive, indeed revolutionary force lurking behind these words of his. Assign responsibility according to skill?" - p 65

This is a convincingly written bk b/c it makes me think that Levi has been there, has been in the work environments he describes:

"But you mustn't think we just stood there and pushed by guesswork: there was a control booth, nice and heated, and there was even a Coke machine, closed-circuit television, and a phone link with the men working the jacks. All you had to do was press a button and you could see on the TV screen whether everything was aligned. Oh, I almost forgot: between the jacks and the sledges there were also pizeometric cells, with their dials in the booth, so you could see the stress at any moment." - p 67

Such writing isn't straight out of a tech manual or details like the Coke machine might not be in there. SO, we have the realism in size described in terms of the narrator's implied physical environment, in the presence of the Coke machine, & in the all-too-human lapses of memory:

"["]instead of cats we looked more like animals—I can't remember their names—that you see in the zoo: they have an idiot face, they laugh all the time, their paws end in hooks, and they move slowly, clinging to branches, their heads hanging down." - p 72

A hyena-sloth?! The Monkey's Wrench is a paean to labor, very skillfully written from someone who obviously worked hard at many levels his whole life:

"There also exists a rhetoric on the opposite side, however, not cynical, but profoundly stupid, which tends to denigrate labor, to depict it as base, as if labor, our own or others', were something we could do without, not only in Utopia, but here, today; as if anyone who knows how to work were, by definition, a servant, and as if, on the contrary, someone who doesn't know how to work, or knows little, or doesn't want to, were for that very reason a free man."

[..]

"We can and must fight to see that the fruit of labor remains in the hands of those who work, and that work does not turn into punishment" - p 80

Now, b/c I'm not independently wealthy, b/c I'm not the recipient of inherited wealth, I've worked since I was a teenager. In addition to having to support myself, I've also worked even harder to create the things that I've imagined, that I think are important, that please me, that're the fruits of my imagination: the 437 movies I've made so far, the hundreds of (d) compositions, the over-412 'performances', the 192 audio publications, the 583 printed matter / online publications, & more, always more..

The work I've had to do for money has often not compensated me to my satisfaction, & this work is a punishment of sorts for not being born rich, for not being a thief. Despite all that, I have learned things from working, from working for money ie, that I probably wdn't've learned otherwise, that I'm glad to know. I've learned to use tools that I wdn't have access to at home, in a more domestic environment - tools like a pallet-jack or a Big Joe, like a biscuit-joiner or a panel-saw, 35 mm projectors or 32-pair punch-down tools.

While there are good reasons to resent the work that one does for too little pay to make money for those who are privileged rather than intelligent, there're also good reasons to build up one's own self-respect thru practical knowledge & skill acquired.

Demonstrating Levi's point, I think of the all-too-many times in my life when I've been treated like a subhuman for actually doing work by people too stupid to be able to do what I was doing & too privileged to ever have to.

EG: Once I was building a collaborative installation. The part that I was building had been entirely conceived of by me & was being entirely built by me. My collaborator, who certainly did have ideas & skills but who often lacked get-up-&-go (except to go away from where the work was to be done), was standing around not doing much of anything while I was up on a ladder installing something in the ceiling.

An apparently well-to-do woman came into the room & started to babble effusively about 'my collaborator's installation'. It didn't apparently occur to her that the person who was actually doing the work might also be the person who'd conceived of most of the installation. B/c I was actually working, instead of just standing around, it seemed to be taken for granted that I was just the 'hired help', a mere functionary of barely human nature.

I'm further reminded of a job I had where I designed & built event props along w/ other working stiffs. We'd do all the work & then the owner of the company wd get all the compliments from people for the beautiful job 'he'd done'. He hadn't done anything much beyond be the son of a judge. But to those praising him, the people who'd done the actual work were just morlocks - best kept unseen.

Another rich friend of mine w/ substantial inherited wealth once talked about an electronic musical instrument that 'he'd built'. I asked him if he'd actually built it & it came out that, no, he'd pd someone else to build it. That's a common trick of the wealthy - to take credit for work done by others. When you buy a car do you say that you built it?

The rich people who denigrate labor do so to create the myth that it's 'beneath them' when, in actuality, it's beyond them. Such a myth helps justify underpayment & over-profiteering - hence Levi's point that the "the fruit of labor remains in the hands of those who work". If that were to be the case, my millionaire friend wd have a helluva time feeding his family & I'd be sitting pretty. ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
"I really believe that to live happily you have to have something to do, but it shouldn't be too easy, or else something to wish for, but not just any old wish: something there's hope of achieving."

Primo Levi's The Monkey's Wrench is a bundle of words, concise and passionate, light-hearted enough to arouse an emotional disconnect from its characters. It tells a series of conversations between two people who acquaint each other, in a number of encounters, through sharing of stories about their job; one a rigger, the other a chemist. In these conversations about accidents, experiences, and arguments that happened in their job Levi reminds the importance of loving your bread and butter at the end of the day amidst the hiccups and loose definition the hard work; hard work does not necessarily results to a job well done. Each but not most has a lesson to give.

The Monkey's Wrench is a silently profound tribute to work, an ode perhaps — the joy it brings as part of a life ordinarily yet satisfyingly lived. ( )
  lethalmauve | Jan 25, 2021 |
This is a book about an Italian ironworker/ rigger who works throughout the world, and his differing impressions and observations. ( )
  FoxTribeMama | Oct 2, 2016 |
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» Add other authors (15 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Primo Leviprimary authorall editionscalculated
BascoveCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
De Matteis-Vogels, FridaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Moreno Carrillo, BernardoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Weaver, WilliamTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Eh no: tutto non le posso dire. O che le dico il paese, o che le racconto il fatto: io però, se fossi in lei, sceglierei il fatto, perché è un bel fatto.
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Original title: La chiave a stella (The Wrench). Published in the US as The Monkey's Wrench.
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This is not a book for journalists. Civil servants, too, will feel uneasy while reading it, and as for lawyers, they will never sleep again. For it is about a man in his capacity as homo faber, a maker of things with his hands, and what has any of us ever made but words. I say it is 'about' the man who makes; truly, it is more a hymn of praise than a description, and not only because the toiler who is the hero of the book is a hero indeed - a figure, in his humanity, simplicity, worthy of inclusion in the catalogue of mythical giants alongside Hercules, Atlas, Gargantua and Orion. He is Faussone, a rigger' Bernard Levin, THE TIMES

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