Sunday Morning! “The Monkey’s Wrench” by Primo Levi

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately, although it always feels that way when you’ve got a number of things on the go and books become the concrete squished between solid blocks of time. There’s a reason I think that Paradise and Purgatory don’t really seem so different, being wide expanses of time with nothing much to do. As it is, I might have to return to that prelapsarian era when life was lived completely off-line in order to get everything done. Courage now!

As things stand, one of the main things occupying my time is Work. It is well known that one must work all the time to afford living in New York. But it’s also understood that this is a virtual Land of Opportunity. And so, I seem to have reached the point that I might “go full time” at one of the FOUR part-time jobs I now work, with all of the benefits and insurance that implies. I enjoy this particular work quite a bit, although after about three decades of work-as-such, I’ll admit to much ambivalence, where perhaps there was once ambition. At any rate, New York is a city with a sufficient number of ambitious young people, and every one of them, I find, is a “consultant.”

Incidentally, one of the things I’ve been reading this week is the collection of Hannah Arendt essays “Thinking Without a Banister,” and right off the bat she makes a point about Karl Marx’s thought that’s probably pretty obvious, although I’ve never really paid Marx much attention: namely, what she calls his “glorification of labor” was actually a radical shift in philosophy, triggered because he saw before others did the significance of the laboring class entering into history with the industrial and French Revolutions. Traditionally, you see, Western philosophy saw labor as a “curse,” tied up with mere survival. To the Greeks, politics was the work of men who did not labor. Even people like Kant saw labor as something mankind would eventually overcome as society reached a sort of spiritual perfection in the unfolding of history. By contrast, Marx saw that a society in which wealth is founded in labor would eventually make everyone a laborer, which is kind of what happened; it’s just we define everything as labor now, even consulting.

Coincidentally, I also read Primo Levi’s 1978 novel The Monkey’s Wrench, which is all about work and storytelling and the joys of both. Our narrator is an Italian chemist, not unlike Levi, stationed at a secluded work camp in Russia, not unlike Fiat’s Togliattigrad, passing the time by listening to the stories of a rigger named Faussone who has been doing the work for some time and seemingly considers it to be the greatest joy of life. The book is structured as a series of stories about jobs that went well, jobs that almost went awry and how Faussone solved the problems, and a few that were never quite fixed. Meanwhile, the chemist is trying to solve a mystery of his own about why an epoxy isn’t working as it should. In his heart, however, he wants to retire from the business of chemistry and begin assembling stories as a professional writer. Not unlike Levi.

Primo Levi is best remembered as one of the great novelists of the Holocaust; he was one of the few Italian Jews sent to Auschwitz who survived, and he wrote about it in the memoir If This is a Man (“Survival in Auschwitz” in America). At the time the book was published, 1947, he was working as an independent chemist, which he found to be a precarious existence, and he started soon after at SIVA, becoming technical director in 1950. He kept writing all the while and finally went into semi-retirement in order to have more time to write in 1974.

Chemist Primo Levi

He met plenty of riggers in his work. Construction rigger is one of those jobs that requires great skill and sense and sensibility. They’re not only central to large-scale construction projects; they’re key to safety because, if they set a structure or gear incorrectly, the results could be catastrophic. Faussone tells about jobs where the managers or engineers were unskilled, or he made mistakes of his own, and hair-raising disasters were narrowly averted. There’s even a story about a monkey who nearly wrecked a job by frigging in the rigging.

At the same time, we sense there’s genuine freedom in Faussone’s life of traveling the world alone to make sure large jobs are done right. He talks about visiting bridges he was responsible for overseeing in construction and taking great pride that they are still standing. It is a simple joy, but quite literally a concrete one.

A fair criticism of the novel would be that Faussone is a bit one-dimensional as a character: solitary and independent, his entire life is tied up in his work. Gradually though, a philosophy of work emerges in the story, in which doing challenging labor with one’s hands and mind, and doing it well, is the greatest joy we are afforded in this life. I’ve often thought we underestimate the satisfaction that even the meagerest job can bring to one who has mastered it. It’s not a delusion of “capitalism” to take pride in a lousy job well done. And even a crappy day at work can make for a good story. Now, however, I have to get back to work!

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, or working on this weekend?