The Wrench by Primo Levi Review: A Joyful Ode to Work and Storytelling

The Wrench is a novel structured as a series of interconnected stories exchanged between two men at a remote workcamp. On one side is Libertino Faussone, a construction rigger who has worked in every corner of the world; on the other is an unnamed chemist narrator, drawn loosely from Levi himself. The two strike up an unlikely friendship, and Faussone — laconic, practical, proud of his craft — does most of the talking, recounting episodes from a working life marked by technical crises, eccentric colleagues, and the particular satisfaction of a job done well. The chemist offers his own stories in return, including an account of developing a paint coating durable enough to hold Russian anchovies inside cans. One of Faussone's tales, which gives the book its title, involves a chimpanzee that assists him in building a derrick. The book was first published in Italian by Einaudi in 1978 under the title La Chiave a Stella, and appeared in English translation in 1987.

Readers who know Levi primarily through If This Is a Man or The Periodic Table will find The Wrench a striking counterpart. Where those works carry the weight of Auschwitz, this novel — written after Levi retired from the family chemical firm SIVA — is semi-autobiographical in a quieter, more domestic sense. Its interest in what Levi called the homo faber, man as maker and tool-user, connects it closely to The Periodic Table, with which it shares a structure of linked episodes. But the emotional register is quite different: commentators are in broad agreement that The Wrench is the happiest and most humorous of Levi's works, and it has been described as a comic novel. Simon & Schuster's editorial framing calls it "a tribute to storytelling, human ingenuity, and the importance of finding meaningful work in life."

One of the novel's distinctive qualities is the degree to which its specific episodes are rooted in Levi's actual professional experience. The story in which Faussone struggles to diagnose a failed acetic acid separation column — whose ceramic contents have disintegrated into sludge — mirrors almost exactly an incident that occurred at SIVA, in a column Levi himself had designed. This grounding in real industrial experience gives the book's technical episodes an authority that sets them apart from fictional workshop-talk. Levi's retirement from SIVA freed him to process those working years imaginatively, and the novel is the result: a chemist's memoir refracted through the stories of a rigger.

The book's critical reception has not been without friction. While commentators broadly regard it as Levi's most joyful work, many Italian leftist critics took issue with the novel at the time of its publication, arguing that its enthusiastic, almost celebratory portrayal of manual and industrial labour was too untroubled — too positive about the conditions of work in a capitalist industrial economy. That debate has its own historical context, but it points to something real in the novel: The Wrench is genuinely optimistic about skilled physical labour in a way that resists easy ideological categorisation. Readers seeking Levi at his most complex or morally searching may find this brightness disarming; readers open to a different register will find it bracing.

The Wrench rewards readers drawn to literary fiction that takes work seriously — not as metaphor or background, but as a subject in its own right, with its own pleasures, frustrations, and dignity. Its episodic, anecdote-driven structure makes it accessible without being slight; each story stands on its own while building toward a portrait of Faussone as a man defined by competence and restless motion. For readers coming to Levi for the first time, The Periodic Table is the more common entry point, but The Wrench offers something those readers will want to return to: a Levi unclouded by trauma, delighting in the mechanics of the world and the mechanics of storytelling in equal measure.