A grad school colleague, knowing of my interest in literature and science, recommended this book to me. I couple years later I bought it so I could scan a couple chapters and teach it in my "vision of science"–themed academic writing class. Based on a quick skim, I selected a couple that looked good to teach, but this did not happen; a couple weeks into the course, it became clear to me I had assigned too much reading, and I dropped the readings from the schedule, much to my students' relief. But of course I chucked the book onto my reading list, and some six years later I have finally gotten around to it.
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Originally published: 1975 Acquired: January 2018 Read: August 2024 |
It's my first work by Levi, and an interesting one. Like a lot of collections, I did not glom onto every story but there were a number of good ones. A lot of the stuff about Levi's young attempt to get into chemistry are quite funny, especially his attempts at romance, and there's an interesting tale of his attempt to solve contamination at a chemical site.
But it is also, of course, a book about fascism and how it affects our lives. I found this passage from "Potassium" about the certainty of chemistry fascinating:
the Fascism around us did not have opponents. We had to begin from scratch, 'invent' our anti-Fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to use sources of certainty.
[...]
Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide or methyl violet... was amusing, even exhilarating, but... [w]hy in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo [school] the truth revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. (43-4)
We may like to think of science as source of certainty in an uncertain world, but Levi argues that the truths of science are as arbitrary the truths of humans when you come down to it—there is nothing to be found in science that will let you resist fascism.
Or is there? Later, in "Chromium," he solves a bit of a scientific mystery and imparts to his coworkers a new process they have to follow to avoid contamination issues. Years later, he has long left that plant, but the process remains:
my report went the way of all flesh: but formulas are as holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. As so my ammonium chloride... by now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore. (133)
There's an odd sort of hope in this, tinged with melancholy. The good you do can linger for a long time... albeit until it has become actively harmful in its own way! Humans cling on to revealed truths, for good or for ill—this is probably the lasting lesson of fascism, religion, science, and The Periodic Table.
The best story in the book is "Vanadium," where Levi bumps into a German chemist he knows from the concentration camp. Levi wants to find the man a monster against which to validate himself; the German chemist wants to use Levi to vindicate himself as someone who really was not that bad. Neither gets what he wants—it's a really touching meditation on complicity and blame. It ends kind of uncertainly, but how else could it?
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