Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
They’re a mixture of short stories and autobiographical essays. Levi uses the elements from the periodic table as a way of organising memory
You start with Primo Levi, who is famous for his memories of Auschwitz. He worked in the labs there, as a prisoner, and that’s how he avoided the gas. But you’ve chosen another of his books, The Periodic Table, which uses the chemical elements as a framework for a series of short stories.
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.
I’m watching a TV series at the moment about a high-school chemistry teacher who winds up cooking crystal meth. He tells his students that chemistry is about the study of transformation.
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.
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William Fiennes is the bestselling author of The Snow Geese, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Music Room. He was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2003, and has written for publications including London Review of Books, Granta and The Times Literary Supplement. Since 2007, Fiennes has been writer-in-residence at the American School in London, and at Cranford Community College, Hounslow. He is director and co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009
These are 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 and we’re made of, as counterposed to spirit – 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.
So it’s not straightforward memoir.
I’m a bit allergic to the word “memoir”. Obviously my own most recent book, The Music Room, could be called a memoir. And it was. But the word always gives me an inward shiver, because I feel it’s diminishing. I worry about the memoir being an intrinsically egotistical form. Look at the word itself. It starts with “me” and follows it up with “moi”. It’s the me me book. Whereas [Primo Levi] is looking at the world outside the ego.
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