"Ordinary, irresponsible and unruffled". Libertino Faussone vs Captain Macwhirr

Mengoni, Martina (2017). "Ordinary, irresponsible and unruffled". Libertino Faussone vs Captain Macwhirr. Anglistica Pisana, 14(1-2), pp. 87-97. ETS

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Focusing on the influence of Joseph Conrad in Primo Levi’s work, this paper
follows three steps. First of all, it explores the structural, stylistic and rhetoric relationships between Levi’s character Libertino Faussone from La chiave a stella and Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr from Typhoon. Secondly, tracing the genesis of La chiave a stella in the broader context of Levi’s intellectual biography, it tries to show how during the 1960s Levi started to pursue a technical epic, shaped by Conrad’s readings, and how he eventually found it while working on Il sistema periodico. Thirdly, it demonstrates why this technical epic, consistent with Levi’s autobiography as a chemist, needed a “leading motive”, an alter-ego, “another way to say I” in order to enact the narrative paradox of La chiave a stella: making a men of few words the narrator of his own epic.

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