Another day, another award

Last night, at New York's Columbia University, Philip Roth picked up the first Grizane Masters Award from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America "in recognition of his merit as a writer and for introducing the work of Primo Levi to a wider American audience." This is the latest in a long string of awards for Roth -- who earlier this month took home the inaugural PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction -- but the first, one has to think, that honors his role as a reader, in addition to his acuity with the written word.

Certainly, no contemporary fiction writer could be more deserving. Not only does his career, which now spans half a century, offer a remarkably coherent vision of American life since the 1940s, but he has long been a champion of other writers -- Levi, as well as such novelists as Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski and Milan Kundera, who were first published in this country as part of the Roth-edited series "Writers From the Other Europe."

In his acceptance speech, Roth recalled meeting Levi in 1986, and quoted from a piece he wrote at the time: "It is not as surprising as one might initially think, that writers divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don't. Levi listens, and with his entire face. . . . It's no wonder that people are always telling him things and that everything is already faithfully recorded before it is written down."

— David L. Ulin 4/18/07