More red book

Been having a bit of a feast of red books lately. First the Agatha, then the ogre and now another. This another prompted by Sacks (see 23rd November), as a result of which I thought I would read something more about the periodic table. Now, ordinarily, for a purpose such as this, I would go and have a browse in Foyles, where I would almost certainly have found the sort of thing I was looking for, lurking somewhere between popular science and an undergraduate text.

As it was, I was reduced to asking Amazon which is a much less reliable procedure. Ask him about periodic tables and he comes up with a whole lot of stuff, including a book called 'The Periodic Table' by one Primo Levi. Well, I thought to myself, Primo Levi was a chemist. Perhaps he had a youthful fascination with the periodic table and has moved on enough from his bad war to write about it. So I order one up and a few days later a rather nice book turns up from the Everyman's Library, as a piece of book production very like the L'ogre noticed yesterday, complete with silken bookmark. In this case with the book having been pressed sufficiently for the bookmark to have left a mark, or rather a dent, on a surprisingly large number of pages.

It turns out not to be about the periodic table at all, rather a sort of memoir loosely keyed to 21 elements from the periodic table. From just before the second war, during the war (including just one from his days near Auschwitz) and after the war. The life and times of a budding, then a working chemist. A very moving memoir, quite different from that of Sacks, whose early life was rather gilded by comparison, except perhaps with regard to his rather dreadful boarding school, an experience Levi was spared.

Very striking what a ramshackle place the Italy of the late 30's was. How old fashioned the teaching of chemistry was. There were nice glimpses of the rather humdrum life of an industrial chemist in the late 40's, fussing perhaps about the chromium content of successive batches of something or rather to get mixed up into paint. A chemist who got his hands dirty, quite unlike Sacks - who did not, as it turned out make it to chemist at all. Plus, a rather odd post-war glimpse of the German chemist who was his boss near Auschwitz.

All in all a tremendous find, and a piece of pure luck. I shall probably go back now and re-read the two books by Levi which I already had. One, sadly, in a Folio edition which I shall probably find rather irritating, far inferior to Everyman's. Hopefully such matters will not distract me too much.