This year, proving that life is large,...

This year, proving that life is large, I read William Kotzwinkle’s “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” (Doubleday), the funniest fable of our time: a satire on the wacky enterprises of writing, publishing, promoting and book-selling, in the form of a shaggy Hemingway tale of a manuscript-toting bear who, since he is furry, rough and greedy, is treated as the season’s new genius. And at the other end of the literary spectrum, I finally read Primo Levi’s “Survival at Auschwitz,” a work of astonishing literary gift and moral genius. Levi was a writer who could make a criminal’s wiping his greasy hand on a Jew’s shirt stand for the entire horror of the Holocaust.