Fame by Andy Warhol ** (#47) 
Andy Warhol’s Fame is the forty-seventh book on the Penguin Moderns list. I read a little book by Warhol about cats several months ago, and didn’t much like it. Whilst Fame is very different in what it set out to do, I was not much looking forward to reading it. In this book, ‘the legendary pop artist Andy Warhol’s hilarious, gossipy vignettes and aphorisms on the topics of love, fame and beauty’ can be found. The pieces collected here were selected by the editors of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975).
Fame consists of three sections – ‘Love (Senility)’, ‘Beauty’, and ‘Fame’. Each section is made up of fragments of various pieces which Warhol wrote. From the beginning, I must admit that I did not enjoy his prose style; I found it a little too matter-of-fact and bitty. The prose also felt rather repetitive, more so due to the distinct subject groupings used here. Some of the fragments have very little to say, and there is barely any flesh on many of his utterances; rather, there is only a kind of skeleton structure to the book. It feels as though scores of random ideas and sentences have been jotted down in a notebook, and were not revised in any way before being published.
I found Fame rather jarring to read. Much of the content verged on odd, and the entirety was very dated. There is no sense that it has transferred well to the twenty-first century. I found this collection shallow and superficial, and Warhol sometimes crosses lines. For instance, Warhol writes: ‘Sometimes people having nervous breakdown problems can look very beautiful because they have that fragile something to the way they move or walk. They put out a mood that makes them more beautiful.’ Fame was not particularly interesting in any way to me, and it is one of a handful of Penguin Moderns which I have finished solely because it is short.
The Survivor by Primo Levi **** (#48)
I have read some of Levi’s non-fiction in the past, but had no idea that he had written any poetry until I picked up The Survivor, the forty-eighth book on the Penguin Moderns list. The blurb notes: ‘From the writer who bore witness to the twentieth century’s darkest days, these verses of beauty and horror include the poem that inspired the title of his memoir, If This is a Man.’ All of the poetry collected in The Survivor has been taken from Collected Poems, which was first published in 1988, one year after Levi’s death, and have been translated from their original Italian by Jonathan Galassi.
I imagined, quite rightly, that the poetry collected here would be rather hard-hitting. The majority of these poems are haunted by Levi’s experiences of the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Throughout, Levi’s words and imagery are evocative and heartfelt, and there is a questioning and searching element to each of his poems. The collection is poignant and incredibly dark. Much of the imagery here is chilling; in ‘Shema’, for instance, he writes:
‘Consider if this is a woman,
With no hair and no name
With no more strength to remember
With empty eyes and a womb as cold
As a frog in winter.’
There is an overarching sense throughout the collection, however, of looking forward rather than back, and of not losing hope. I found Levi’s spirit remarkable; even in his darkest days, he is able to picture his future. In ‘After R.M. Rilke’, he says:
‘We’ll spend the hours at our books,
Or writing letters to far away,
Long letters from our solitude;
And we’ll pace up and down the avenues,
Restless, while the leaves fall.’
The Survivor is an incredibly memorable collection, and one which I will certainly revisit in future.
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