The Periodic Table

"It was a personal discovery of mine. It came into the Guardian books department of which I was not then the editor. I picked it up—I’d read about it in the New York Review of Books —and I said to the literary editor, ‘You’ve got to review this one.’ He said, ‘Oh do you think so, old boy?’ Or something like that. Later, he came to me and asked if I could review it. He said there was only one page for the six or seven thousand books a year that turn up at the Guardian. Most papers then only reviewed about 600 books in the course of a year. So it was quite difficult to make sure that this one would run. I had already read it by the time he came to me and I just jumped on it. I’m only sorry now that I didn’t say what I thought at the time, which is that this is a book that we’ll all be reading in 100 years. You tend to be a little guarded and I simply described the book as ‘gold’ all the way through — or some such remark. It’s a life story by a chemist seen through the prism of an elemental substance. Some of it doesn’t work very well and some of it works very well. There’s a lovely chapter on iron that refers to the arrival of the Fascist era. There’s a much more personal account involving mine tailings and the extraction of precious metals from mine tailing, which he was employed at. That gives him a chance to contemplate the nature of matter itself and why the stuff that’s in the ground is the same as the stuff that actually composes our bodies. And why things that happen in chemistry can be subtly different if you alter the element that’s involved in the process. All of it is illuminating. You read it and you understand the world around you much better for having read even a sentence of Levi. You just think, ‘God, I hadn’t thought of that before and isn’t this so beautifully put?’ But you don’t spend a lot of time doing that whilst you’re reading the book because I don’t know of another writer who can make the things that are important to us as important as they should be but he does. And then, of course, it’s not just an account of being a chemist in troubled times: he was an actor in one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, one that affected all of our lives. I was born in 1940 so by the time the war was over, I knew there had been a war. The photographs of Belsen and the other camp survivors had already started appearing in the papers. The world was full of refugees and people who were lost. Levi’s account is central to that. He, once again, uses the idea of a chemical element to tell the story of how he survived in a concentration camp and, later on, he tells a story—a little more slippery—of the identification of his Auschwitz slave master from the characteristic misspelling of an element in a consignment of goods. This too is a book that I refer to again and again and not just because he signed it for me! Yes, I know that that is what people want but whenever I write for anybody, all I want is for the reader to read it. I don’t care what it is that makes him or her read it but I do want them to read it. And any literary trick, imagery, bit of poetry, bit of hooptedoodle—as John Steinbeck called it—anything you can use to keep the reader reading is legitimate. In the case of Mailer and Levi, they know what they’re doing and they’re doing it in a very accomplished way. Even when they’re doing it badly, Mailer is doing it well. But the notion of a formula for science writing is one we should discard. It’s about understanding the world, it’s not about understanding science. Science is just a tool for unlocking some of the mysteries and puzzles that we’re all privy to. We’ve got a fine example of it in the clarity of Haldane, who I’m fond of quoting as the man who once said that, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” Although that’s simple and clear and unmistakable, it also seems, to me, to be quite profound and an idea that can take you in any direction."

"There are quite a few books about the Holocaust that have been recommended multiple times on Five Books : I’ve read Night by Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning , a reflection on what being a human is about, based on Frankl’s experience in the death camps. Most frequently recommended is Primo Levi’s If This is a Man , though I have to confess that I’ve avoided reading it. Instead, I read his book The Periodic Table , about his life as a chemist before the war, which is a beautiful, beautiful book. (I also recommend In the Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorigo Bassano , a novel about a Jewish family that’s also set during that twilight period in Italy before Jews were deported)."

"They’re a mixture of short stories and autobiographical essays, or essays in autobiography. Levi uses the elements from the periodic table as a way of organising memory. He uses 21 elements, each as a doorway or wormhole into a particular area of his experience, into a particular memory – but leaving out his time in Auschwitz, because he’d already written about that. You get his early interest in chemistry, his early experiments, the friends he studied with, the atmosphere of the laboratories and the characters of the professors who taught him. It’s about his interest in matter, the stuff the world is made of, as counterposed to spirit. He wrote another great book, The Wrench , which is a series of soliloquies from a mechanic called Faussone. Levi is the scribe as Faussone describes all these things he’s built – bridges, oil derricks – and the excitement of putting things together. In The Periodic Table , you also get that fascination with the stuff the world’s made of and we’re made of – the wonder of it. Levi is fascinated with how elements react, with the way they become salts and oxides and so on. There are a lot of transformations happening, which I suppose strikes a chord with the personal transformations of grief, separation, longing, love, friendship. That’s most obviously brought out in the final story, titled “Carbon”, which is really the story of one carbon atom. It might start inside a human being and then go into a tree, a pencil, a glass of milk, and then re-enter the bloodstream, become a nerve cell, a neuron. There’s this extraordinary moment at the end, where he imagines the carbon atom in the part of his brain that’s deciding whether to write one word rather than another. It’s a brilliant conceptual leap, that the abstraction of what he’s writing becomes the concrete matter on the page. He’s bringing together these two worlds – the inward world of the imagination or intelligence, and the outward, concrete world of books, trees and bodies."