SOURCE: “Strangers in the Universe,” in New York Times Book Review, May 7, 1989, pp. 14-15.

In the following review of Other People's Trades, Michaels deems Levi as “original, various, always lucid; there is a pleasing natural consistency to him.”

Primo Levi's essays collected in Other People's Trades, treat many different subjects; among them are love, chess, poetry, fleas, beetls, wood, snakes, language, Rabelais, fear, frogs, computers, his house in Turin, Italy, and his family. He writes on things that are vast (the cosmos) and things that are minute (paramecia), and on relations between the vast and minute. He is original, various, always lucid; there is a pleasing natural consistency to him. Often, whatever his topic, he is inspired to tell stories and, in the manner of Aesop, he sometimes supplies a moral.

In several essays he arrives at a paradoxical vision.

Here, for example, he remembers his grandmother.

“She...