Il sistema periodico

«Con questo suo nuovo libro, Primo Levi ci dimostra come in lui la vocazione di scrittore-testimone non si sia esaurita nella pagine mirabili di Se questo è un uomo e di La tregua.
A prima vista, si tratta qui dell'autobiografia di un chimico, articolata in ventun "momenti" ognuno dei quali trae spunto da un elemento: l'azoto, il carbonio, il piombo, il nichel e così via. Sono dunque altrettanti incontri con la materia, vista volta a volta come madre o come nemica, davanti a cui si rinnova la condizione atavica dell'uomo cacciatore in lotta col mondo intorno a lui per conoscerlo e per sopravvivere: storie di un mestiere "che è poi un caso particolare, una versione più strenua, del mestiere di vivere"; ricco di sconfitte di vittorie e di miserie, di avventure e di incontri, capace di impegnare in pari misura la ragione e la fantasia.
Ma il libro racconta anche la storia di una generazione, qui rappresentata nei suoi esponenti migliori (si veda la splendida figura di Sandro Delmastro). Ne esce ricostruita la vicenda di una formazione civile maturata negli anni del fascismo, poi nelle drammatiche vicende della guerra, della lotta partigiana, della deportazione, del reinserimento nella faticosa ripresa del dopoguerra: è la storia esemplare di chi, partendo dalla concretezza del mestiere di chimico, si autoeduca a capire le cose e gli uomini, a prendere posizione, a misurarsi, con una ironia ed una autoironia che non escludono la fermezza.
O forse il libro può essere letto come un apologo: la sfida ininterrotta con la materia inerte o malevola è una metafora conradiana dell'esistenza, della sua opacità di fondo, su cui emergono stranezze, fallimenti e riuscite imprevedibili. Come in tutti i libri di Primo Levi, anche qui la serenità del giudizio morale fa tutt'uno con una scrittura di classica precisione; si ritrova, trasferita in un campo meno disumano, l'esigenza di testimoniare a favore della ragione e della dignità».

«The author of this book – a series of essays each named after a chemical element – is an organic chemist. The book, however, is not about chemistry but about the personal and emotional development of the author. Levi is a Jew and a famous Italian writer, best known for two books entitled Survival in Auschwitz and The Re-awakening in English translation. Both are expressions of human survival by dignity and of Jewish humor without pathos – a combination rare among American Jewish writers.
The present book is again a terse, low-key, but intensely serious document of life under stress-either the stress of a youth curbed by fascism or the stress of a chemist struggling with stubbornly defective reagents. The names of chemical elements are used sometimes as metaphors, sometimes more literally to provide occasions for sharp vignettes of the author's early life. As a Jewish student in a fascist society that made Jews openly pariahs; as a climber who found relief in fighting mountain slopes instead of the unapproachable fascist rulers; as a partisan facing the Nazi enemy in those same mountains; and finally as a young chemist learning to deal with the incompetence or worse of the industrial world – Levi sustains an evenness of mood through which shines the consciousness of a hard personal integrity.
Among the essays the first, Argon, depicts the little-known society of Piedmontese Jews, in which both Levi and this reviewer were raised, a culture that for a long time hardly interacted with the surrounding Christian world (hence behaving like the noble gas argon in air) yet made some outstanding contributions to Italian intellectual life. Anthropologists may be interested in this essay, which reveals a hitherto neglected facet of Italian society.
The essay called Gold is both personal and symbolic. In prison as a partisan, his life in immediate danger, Levi found relief in consorting with a professional smuggler who had at some time eked a living by collecting a few flakes of gold from a mountain river. The implied message: there is some gold to be found in a human being, or in a river, or in prison if you are alert to it.
Other essays are closer to natural science. Potassium – set in 1941 – tells of a brief courtship the author had with physics as a possible vocation. The immediate impetus was apparently the willingness of a young physics teacher of philosophical bent to take seriously the intellectual eagerness of a student whom chemistry teachers had, not surprisingly, left unstimulated. This reviewer, who a few years earlier had found among Italian physicists the intellectual stimulus liberating him from a humdrum medical education, can vouch almost to the last comma for the authenticity of the experience described by Levi.
Arsenic is a vignette that could easily have been turned into a crime investigation in the hands of a less sensitive author. One of his first clients brings to Levi a pound of sugar which he suspects of having been doctored. Levi analyzes it and finds plenty of arsenic. For the rest of the day he goes on with other work. Next day the client returns, hears the verdict, explains calmly that a competitor – a cobbler like himself – has been making his life hard and now has apparently attempted to poison him. No fuss, no police; the cobbler, a quiet Piedmontese, will return the sugar to his enemy and "explain two or three things" to him. Levi's philosophy of constructive faith in reasoning reminds me, here and elsewhere in the book, of Diderot's trust in human common sense.
Vanadium is the story of a more recent event. While dealing with a German firm concerning a batch of imported resin (which misbehaved because of a vanadium salt impurity) Levi discovered that his German correspondent was the same man who had been his boss in the Auschwitz camp. The exchanges that ensue illustrate the conflicts of an honest man divided between the forgiveness demanded by personal self-respect and the contempt felt for a Nazi colleague – truly an impurity in the scientific milieu.
In all 18 essays the writing has an immediacy achieved without sacrifice of sophisticated literary skill. The English translation manages to keep the freshness of the original Italian best seller. Primo Levi succeeds in transforming chemical concepts and processes into metaphorical comments on life. He also achieves the more difficult feat of writing autobiographical stories without either self-effacement or self-congratulation. These essays are in fact, as the author calls them in the essay called Nickel, "tales of militant chemistry"».