How did Levi evolve as a writer from that to his later stories, like “A Tranquil Star”?
“Bear Meat” is somewhat anomalous. It was an experimental story, and the narrative form is more complicated than that of most of his other stories, because it’s a story, or two stories, within a story. Several mountain climbers are sitting around in a hut, and two of them tell the story of their first bad experience, their loss of innocence in the mountains. The second story-within-a-story actually recurs in “The Periodic Table,” and there Levi uses the man’s real name, so he was a real figure in Levi’s life. Levi sent this story to Italo Calvino, who at the time was an editor at Einaudi. There’s a letter from Calvino to Levi in which he says that while he appreciates the attempt “at Conradian epic,” he feels that “Bear Meat” remains just an “intention.” And Levi never really did anything like that again. Most of Levi’s stories are much more contained. He once wrote, “I hope that each story properly fulfills its task, which is only that of condensing into a few pages, and conveying to
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