On the September Friday that I arrived in Turin - to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before - I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he'd been employed as a research chemist, and, afterwards, until retirement, as factory manager. Altogether the company employs 50 people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled labourers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes - all of it is encompassed in four or five acres a seven-mile drive from Turin. The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never distressingly loud, the yard's acrid odour - the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement - is by no means disgusting, and the skip loaded with the black sludgy residue of the anti-polluting process isn't particularly unsightly. It is hardly the world's ugliest industrial environment, but a very long way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi's autobiographical narratives. On the other hand, however far from the prose, it is clearly a place close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stink, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in The Monkey's Wrench, saying to Levi, who calls Faussone 'my alter ego': 'I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.'

LRB 23 October 1986 | PDF Download