Organic Chemistry
FALKENBERG, BETTY
Organic Chemistry The Periodic Table By Primo Levi Translated by Raymond Rosenthal Schocken. 233 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book...
...Muller the announcement of the unexpected death of Doktor Lothar Muller in his sixtieth year of life...
...Was he going to bring charges, now that he knew what it was...
...the name of the suspect substance is naphenate...
...He lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains—nothing but words, precisely...
...Indeed, his deep human commitments and profound sense of calling give this professional chemist's vocabulary a totally new dimension and urgency...
...The implicit irony in that statement is typical of Levi's mental bent...
...Speaking of the more deceptive elements in "Nickel," the author says: "The entrails of the earth swarm with gnomes, kobolds (cobalt...
...He "spoke as no one speaks, saying only the core of things...
...The old man, it turns out, is a cobbler on the Via Gioberti...
...Opposites inhere, if not in things themselves, then in our perception of them...
...Hauntingly moving documents of incontestable authenticity, the memoirs attested to the author's unusual literary gifts: a keen eye for every kind of detail, a terseness of style, a sparse yet striking use of comparison, and alongside a sophisticated sense of irony a marvelous-ly down-to-earth humor...
...It is used in imprecations, such as'' may it stick in your neck.'' This brings him to the woeful tale of " ex-uncle" Marchin...
...I'll bring it back to him, sol can see the face he makes...
...Arsenic" revolves around "an old man, with heavy hands deformed by work and arthritis," right out of Chekhov...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" In his novel Elective Affinities, Goethe drew on chemistry—the way, for example, alkalines and acids interact—to drive home the inexorable nature of the attractions between his characters...
...The opening one, "Argon," delves into Levi's Jewish-Piedmontese ancestors by way of their curious language and their Periodico-Zodiacal sign, argon (one of "the so-called inert gases...
...Arsenic...
...In a letter, however, Muller spells it "naptenate...
...He wore a vest, from whose pocket dangled a watch chain...
...Iron," a truly compelling chapter, deals with ayouthful friendship...
...He winds up the letter with an urgent request for a meeting, preferably on the French Riviera...
...Contrasts between its rugged Piedmontese texture and its solemn Hebrew inlay thus cause Levi to ponder another more general conflict: between the divine vocation of the Jews scattered among the Gentiles and the daily misery of their existence, mitigated by laughter born of the tension...
...His supplier's name is Muller...
...Although it was not granted to many of his ancestors to be materially inert, their deeds had "a touch of the static" about them...
...Levi writes a personal letter to Muller...
...To Levi's questions about I.G...
...This third work—originally published in Italy in 1975—is again a memoir...
...But matter, "with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentously rich in deception, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx," is no less difficult to comprehend than any human adversary...
...the second with the long trek back to civilian life in Turin...
...Impure for Levi is synonymous with life-giving, with Jewishness, with all that was despised by Fascist and Nazi ideologues...
...Two earlier books by Levi have appeared in English...
...When Susanna rejected Marchin's suit, he took his revenge by selling the sausage recipe to a goy...
...There is...
...Levi raises his attitude of neither condoning nor altogether condemning to a moral precept...
...creatures who can be generous and let you find a treasure beneath the tip of your pickax or deceive and bedazzle you, making modest pyrite glitter like gold...
...He "put cards with his address and telephone number in all the letter boxes...
...One is struck in both cases by the unlikely aptness of the chemical metaphor: its ability to render precise images and at the same time to yield endlessly rich associative material from the unconscious and from myth...
...He was enamored of Susanna, who held the ancient recipe for goose sausage made with the bird's own neck as casing...
...Each chapter focuses on a person, an experience or some facet of the author's past that evokes or corresponds in "weight" to a chemical element...
...If that were not enough, he tells damaging lies about the old man, who is therefore not surprised when one day among the shoes he finds the suspicious parcel...
...This is a story of work in a mine, "a cyclopean cone-shaped gorge, an artificial crater...
...The first dealt with his imprisonment—as a Jew and a partisan—at Auschwitz...
...Ultimately it enters the author's body, where it partakes of his decision on the place for the last period...
...The chapter again addresses the Auschwitz years, but through a new and startling confrontation...
...It concerns deceit, not least self-deceit...
...By now we all know truth is stranger than fiction, yet Levi's gauge for testing that here is a particularly vivid vindication of the chemist's attention to detail...
...It is also about superstition, because to this day "there are still people who go at night to the rubble heaps," searching, "on the borderline between chemistry and white magic," for buried wealth...
...in every way similar to the schematic representations of Hell in the synoptic tables of Dante's Divine Comedy...
...But by its very design and concept it is also a highly conscious artifice that clearly jumps the genre...
...While employed in a varnish factory in the '60s, Levi is obliged to ask a German supplier to investigate some faulty shipments...
...Farben Muller "answered curtly that, yes, it had employed prisoners, but only to protect them...
...Never in quest of memorable feats, what was important to him was "to know his limitations, to test and improve himself...
...In a world where grand principles, grand rhetoric and grand schemes have created so much havoc, it is the human scale that is to be honored...
...Appropriate to the measure of man, then, is the Periodic Table, a precise if modest poetry that can be used to ward off the stench of Fascist "Truths," the misty mystique of dogma...
...At the lab in Auschwitz where Levi was put to work there was also a Muller who said "naptylamin," instead of "napthyla-min...
...Vanadium" gives this theme its most eloquent treatment...
...Now memory's curious wheels begin to turn...
...Yes, his final injunction is: Immerse yourself in such impurity...
...It is no accident that the chosen element, carbon, is an "impurity...
...Eight days later I received from Mrs...
...He claims to have had no knowledge "of any proviso that seemed aimed at the killing of the Jews" —even though on clear days the flames of the crematorium were visible from his factory...
...San-dro climbed the rocks more by instinct than technique, trusting to the strength of his hands and saluting, ironically, in the projecting rock to which he clung, the silicon, calcium and magnesium he had learned to recognize in the course on mineralogy...
...The impishness of the conclusion is of course calculated—but calculated to restore...
...Our function is to take the blows and to hand them out...
...Which explains why commercial goose sausage is so abominable as well as why Marchin can no longer rightfully be called an uncle...
...A more flamboyant writer would have ended on that dramatic note...
...As did Goethe some 200 years earlier, Levi really lives in the scientific and literary realms, so there is never a sense of straining...
...Instead, the final chapter follows the course of a single atom of carbon that lies buried in limestone, until with a blow of the pickax it is freed, "plunged into the world of things that change...
...yes, sir, even a telephone number, as if he were a midwife...
...No, no, I told you, he's only a poor devil and I don't want to ruin him...
...But none of this helped...
...Shades of Gunter Grass...
...The deplorable events of Auschwitz are attributed vaguely to Man...
...He sees in it" an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one's enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man...
...With matter as with man, with words as with actions, we are ever in an adversary relationship...
...In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi turns chemistry's Periodic Law into a system for weighing and elucidating certain chosen elements of his own past...
...Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, the first man to be killed fighting in the Resistance with the Action Party's Piedmontese Military Command...
...Muller has read Levi's book on Auschwitz...
...Now a young man with brand new machines has set up a cobbler's shop just a few doors down...
...The nobility of man lies in making himself "the conqueror of matter" because "understanding matter is necessary to understand the universe and ourselves...
...Just as the chemical metaphor throws light on the human element, the language—like "all languages on the frontier and in transition"—reveals wonderful truths about its users...
...Of the words for neck, Levi tells us, one of them, khanec, means a vital passage that can be obstructed, occluded or severed...
...And "restorative" is perhaps the word that best describes this beautiful gem of a book...
...nickel, German 'Little Demon' or 'sprite...
...A correspondence ensues, and as Muller's persona is revealed a whole typology of German postwar mentality emerges...
...He comes to the pharmaceutical lab where Levi is working to have some sugar "chemistried," to see if there is perhaps some "filth" in it...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 21
