The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi

First published:La chiave a stella, 1978 (English translation, 1986)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1970’s, with reminiscences from previous decades

Locale: The Soviet Union, India, Africa, Alaska, and Italy

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an Italian industrial chemist in late middle age who has a second profession as a writer
• Libertino Faussone, a thirty-five-year-old Italian steel rigger who travels the world erecting bridges, cranes, derricks, and other heavy installations

The Novel

In The Monkey’s Wrench, a series of discursive anecdotes are recounted to an unnamed narrator by Libertino Faussone, a steel rigger whose work takes him all over the world. The stories are about work—the problems, the disasters, the exhilaration when everything finally comes out right. In the final chapters, the narrator, a paint chemist who is also a professional writer, tells his own work story to Faussone.

When the book opens, the narrator explains that he has recently arrived at a factory in a remote area of the Soviet Union and has met Faussone, the only other Italian on the site, in the dining room for foreign visitors. Over a huge plate of roast beef, Faussone recalls a visit to an African port to erect a dockside crane. When the task was completed he expected everyone to celebrate with him, but the workers were in an angry mood. They had been campaigning for the canteen to serve food conforming to their religion, but the boss, who was of another religion, had adamantly refused. At a mass meeting, they put a curse on the boss by ceremonially mutilating his photograph. He became ill and died. His wealthy family took the workers to court, accusing them of “homicide with malice aforethought.” The narrator asks how the trial ended. “You’re kidding,” says Faussone, “it’s still going on....”

Faussone’s second story, set in Italy, gives the first of his many vivid and absorbing descriptions of the technological processes of construction—in this case, the building of a distillation plant. Soon after this immensely complex undertaking was completed, the installation became “sick.” It heaved and groaned like a man in the grip of illness. A design fault was identified and Faussone had to modify the structure by slowly working his way upward for two days inside a vertical pipe. He was overcome by claustrophobia but forced himself to continue. The modification was successful, but he now calls himself a “concave” rigger and leaves the “convex” jobs to others.

Over tea and vodka in his room, Faussone talks about one of the best friends he has ever had—a monkey, which arrived while he was erecting a derrick in a forest clearing and learned to do modest tasks. In its over-enthusiasm for button-pressing, however, it almost destroyed the derrick.

On a Sunday walk in a forest, Faussone tells his companion about the only woman whom he has ever considered marrying—a tall, strapping forklift driver who could corner “better than Nikki Lauda.” Fausonne recalls their lovemaking with uncharacteristic tenderness and confesses that he still yearns for her.

One evening Faussone is unexpectedly befuddled by wine. In a key dialogue, the rigger and the writer discuss the advantages and disadvantages of constructing with metals and constructing with words.

Faussone’s Alaska story is interspersed with recollections of shrimp for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His task was to finish the assembly of a mammoth derrick, load it onto pontoons, and install it some way out to sea. In another of his breathtaking descriptive passages, Fausonne recalls how, perched on the derrick arm, high above the turbulent ocean, he became seasick. Ashamed at this loss of personal style, he nevertheless gamely finished the job.

On a hot September Sunday, the two men take a boat trip on the Volga. Faussone launches into a description of the building of a bridge in Calabria. His India story is also about a bridge: the construction of a suspension bridge across a river. When the piers had been erected, ready for the final span, the river suddenly veered to the left, breaching the embankment, rooting up trees, flooding adjacent fields, and damaging part of the installation. There was nothing Faussone could do except wait until the torrent subsided. Faussone’s enthusiastic description of the drawing of the suspension cables, an extraordinarily complicated and demanding task, is one of the most fascinating passages in the book.

In a confidential mood, Faussone talks about his aunts in Turin. They fuss over him and try to make matches for him. He reminisces, too, about his early working life, when he was a welder.

On a snowy winter’s day, Faussone describes the rigging of a crane in icy conditions in the Soviet Union. On inspection day everything went like clockwork until the inspector tested the rotation. The gigantic steel arm creaked and shuddered. The inspector declared the machine “kaput,” but Faussone discovered that the bevel gear had been sabotaged, probably by someone from a rival French firm. There was a lawsuit. Years passed; the matter is still before the courts, and Faussone is pessimistic about the outcome. “I know what happens,” he says, “when things of iron becomes things of paper.”

In his own story, the narrator explains that he is in the Soviet Union to investigate a complaint that a specialized enamel, supplied by his firm for coating the inside of food tins, becomes lumpy when used for anchovies. Through an ingenious process of deduction, he has discovered that the lumps have been caused by tiny fragments of fiber from the rags used by a Russian official with a mania for cleanliness. The paint contract is saved, and he can return to Italy.

The Characters

Each of the two main characters is absorbed by the demands of his own profession, but while the narrator’s relationship to his work is mainly intellectual, Faussone’s is physical and emotional. Faussone is inspired by the handling of tangible objects and the creation of massive working structures from them, by the poetry of motion when something which he has helped to construct functions elegantly. “It seemed to walk the sky, smooth as silk,” he says, recapturing the moment when the bridge crane began to function. “I felt like they’d made me a duke, and I bought drinks for everyone.”

Faussone has learned his sensitivity to the properties of metals and his fierce spirit of independence from his coppersmith father. In the postwar period, his father refused many lucrative offers of industrial work in order to remain his own boss.

Faussone enjoys good food and wine and a night with a woman. He understands his own nature well enough, however, to know that he will always be ready to give up these pleasures for the supreme achievements offered by his work. Whatever his feelings for the forklift driver, who first attracts him because of her boldness of spirit and her pride in her driving skills, he knows that he will never settle down. He evaluates others in his own terms and even expresses a grudging praise for the artistry of the men who sabotaged the bevel gear. By the same token, he is scornful of “imbeciles” and idlers, salesmen and bureaucrats, and designers who fail to anticipate problems. He is also ashamed of his own weaknesses: his failure to learn to swim, his claustrophobia, and his propensity for seasickness.

Faussone is a fictional character, a “mosaic,” writes the author in a short endpiece, “of numerous men I have met, similar to Faussone and similar among themselves in personality, virtue, individuality, and in their view of work and the world.” The narrator, on the other hand, although unnamed in the book, is not fictional. He is clearly identifiable with Primo Levi himself, possessing the same background, professional experience, and general outlook. He is an older, more scholarly man than Faussone and can illustrate his point with examples from Greek legend as well as from his own life.

One of his functions in the book is to mediate between Faussone and the reader, setting straight the chaotic deviations in his stories, interrupting on behalf of the reader to ask for elucidation, and addressing the reader directly with his own opinions and questions. Having a “real” narrator mediating for a fictitious storyteller is a delightfully ingenious literary device, enabling Levi to characterize the rigger’s narrative style as rough-and-ready while presenting it in readable literary form. It also strengthens the book’s realism—the realism not only of its stories but also of the stories’ underlying humanistic truths.

Critical Context

During World War II, Primo Levi suffered the horrors of Auschwitz, and most of his books written before The Monkey’s Wrench stem directly from this experience. The relationship between people and their work, however, has always been integral to his depiction of character, and it is a major theme in Il sistema periodica (1975; The Periodic Table, 1984); the anchovy story in The Monkey’s Wrench is, in fact, a partial reworking of one of the chapters of The Periodic Table. In The Monkey’s Wrench, wartime events are mentioned only in passing and the work theme is wholly dominant.

Levi always considered himself to be more of a chemist than a writer. The Monkey’s Wrench was published a year after he had retired from his scientific post and had begun to devote himself to writing. Its interior argument about the relative advantages of working with materials or words reflects his own struggle of that time.

At the end of the book, after listening to the narrator’s anchovy story, Faussone urges him not to give up his work as a chemist: “Doing things that you can touch with your hands,” he says, “has an advantage; you can make comparisons and understand how much you’re worth. You make a mistake, you correct it, and next time you don’t make it. But you are older than me,” he adds, “and maybe you’ve already seen enough things in your life.”

In retrospect, there is a sadness about these final words. Levi’s death in May, 1987, was attributed to suicide. Perhaps he had, indeed, “seen enough things” in his life.

Bibliography

Denby, David. “The Humanist and the Holocaust,” in The New Republic. CXCV (July 28, 1986), pp. 27-33.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924-1974, 1983.

King, Francis. “The Romance of Labour,” in The Spectator. CCLVIII (May 9, 1987), p. 39.

Library Journal. Review. CXI (October 15, 1986), p. 110.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. XCI (October 12, 1986), p. 1.

Thomson, Ian. “Mapping the World of Work,” in The Times Literary Supplement. June 5, 1987, p. 610.

Time. Review. CXXVIII (November 17, 1986), pp. 92-93.