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When talking about Primo Levi, it is natural to associate him with the writer-witness of "If This Is a Man" and "The Truce." But Primo Levi is so much more. He is a chemist with the wonderful gift of storytelling so well that he could make a Formula 1 Grand Prix interesting for me if I experienced it through his words.
The most brilliant example of this extraordinary ability is "The Periodic Table," a unique book, that defies any classification, a book in which Primo Levi demonstrates how the craft of chemistry and the craft of living are much more similar than one might imagine, a book for which the writer, a chemist like the author, has an immense and visceral love.
I cannot imagine anyone else capable of writing these twenty-one stories linked to as many chemical elements, mostly autobiographical, managing to handle a subject notoriously unattractive to "laymen," like chemistry, in such a delicate and spontaneous way that it becomes accessible to a far broader audience than it is usually accustomed to dealing with.
With his dry and meticulous style, Primo Levi recounts episodes of his life somehow linked to hydrogen, potassium, chromium, or cerium without wasting a single word, without pointless stylistic exercises, condensing in just over 200 pages a world of experiences, misadventures, failures, achievements, comebacks that unite those two crafts mentioned above.
But chemistry is not the only protagonist; along with it, there are people, there's Sandro, the taciturn friend from "Iron," there's Giulia, the coveted and never-conquered colleague from "Phosphorus," there's Alberto, the inseparable friend from the times in Auschwitz from "Cerium," there are Rodmund and Captain Abrahams, protagonists of the two fantasy stories "Lead" and "Mercury," there's Doctor Muller, the tormentor resurfaced from the past in "Vanadium." And there's, of course, Primo Levi, who, despite the book's strongly autobiographical nature, rarely takes center stage, managing to tell us about himself with care to maintain discretion, without putting himself too much in the spotlight.
And as if that wasn't enough, when you finally reach the twenty-first and last square of this special periodic table, there is "Carbon," the definitive masterpiece tasked with closing the curtain in the best possible way: the story of a carbon atom, its endless transformations, its journey, whose conclusion coincides with that of the book, becomes a hymn raised to the power and perfection of nature, where all the poetry hidden behind a single, seemingly insignificant, atom is forcefully unveiled.
We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are "the two experiences of adult life" Pavese spoke of, success and failure, harpoon the white whale or wreck the ship; one must not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not sit down. We are here for this, to make mistakes and correct ourselves, to take blows and return them. One must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to intelligence; you must circle around, sting, probe, and find the breach or make one. (Nickel)
My favorite book.
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