Levi shows a mastery of literary metallurgy in this collection of reflections on chemistry, life and his life as a chemist. Pellucid descriptions of chemical processes are expounded with the inimitable passion of a man who loves his subject and sees its reflections and redolences all around him. A passage from the chapter on carbon illustrates:
“The air contains 0.03%; if Italy was air, the only Italians fit to build life would be , for example, the 15,000 inhabitants of Milazzo in the province of Messina. This, on the human scale, is ironic acrobatics, a juggler’s trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence-arrogance, since from this ever renewed impurity of the air we come, we animals and we plants, and we the human species, with our 4 billion discordant opinions, our millenniums of history, our wars and shames, nobility and pride. In any event, our very presence on the planet becomes laughable in geometric terms : if all of humanity, about 250 million tons, were to be distributed in a layer of homogenous thickness on all the emergent lands, the ‘stature of man’ would not be visible to the naked eye; the thickness one would obtain would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimetre”
Having shown us the nature of different elements and their behaviour under certain circumstances; he beautifully and effortlessly interweaves these very physical and material properties with the more ethereal and temporal experiences and characters he's encountered in highly varied life. From the chapter on uranium, he explains his experience of being a customer service representative (CS):
“All of a CS’s strategies and tactics can be described in terms of sexual courtship. In both cases, it’s a one-to-one relationship; a courtship or negotiation among three persons would be unthinkable. In both cases one notes at the beginning a kind of dance or ritualised opening in which the buyer accepts the seller only if the latter adheres rigidly to the traditional ceremonial; if this takes place, the buyer joins the dance, and if the enjoyment is mutual, mating is attained, that is, the purchase, to the visible satisfaction of the two partners. The cases of unilateral violence are rare; not by chance are they often described in terms borrowed from the sexual sphere.”
As with many writers I’ve found inspirational, Levi shows us things we instantly recognise: A particular dynamic within a relationship with a friend or lover, an atypical characteristic or unusual pair of traits discovered in a colleague or relative, a poignant scene remembered across decades. I know some of the characters he shows me, just as I know some of the characters in Shakespeare, Cicero, Seneca and Sophocles. Their essence, or some facet of it, has been collected and preserved through the writer’s art.
Chapters take the form of one chosen element and one chosen person or experience from Levi’s life; although it is not followed with rigidity. What arises from these two, seemingly isolated, subjects is an almost inconceivably rich alloy that Levi conjures with all the breathtaking skill of an alchemist. My favourite chapter is ‘Iron’, chapter four, where Levi mixes the ingredients of iron’s characteristics with a sketch of a young friend who died resisting Fascism in Italy during the second world war. In this chapter, I feel he describes something universal that I too have glimpsed through a childhood friend; selfishly, I hope my friend lives longer but, somehow, in the world of elements this seems an irrelevance. Iron is iron and cannot be otherwise.
Chapters take the form of one chosen element and one chosen person or experience from Levi’s life; although it is not followed with rigidity. What arises from these two, seemingly isolated, subjects is an almost inconceivably rich alloy that Levi conjures with all the breathtaking skill of an alchemist. My favourite chapter is ‘Iron’, chapter four, where Levi mixes the ingredients of iron’s characteristics with a sketch of a young friend who died resisting Fascism in Italy during the second world war. In this chapter, I feel he describes something universal that I too have glimpsed through a childhood friend; selfishly, I hope my friend lives longer but, somehow, in the world of elements this seems an irrelevance. Iron is iron and cannot be otherwise.
