Word: levi
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...shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi's had cut a working area roughly the size of a baseball diamond, first by clearing the dense undergrowth and then by dropping to their hands and knees in shoulder-to-shoulder skirmish lines for a preliminary search of the area. Among the items unearthed were bits of human bones...
Many great writers have been obliged to moonlight, some at seemingly incongruous occupations. Christopher Marlowe was a government spy, Henry Fielding a criminal-court justice, Franz Kafka an insurance-company clerk and Herman Melville a customs inspector. Among living writers, Primo Levi has held perhaps the most improbable job. For two decades the Italian author worked as a commercial chemist, analyzing resins and rock samples for makers of varnish and other products. Can literature spring from such mundane matter? Chemistry would seem as impenetrable to the literary imagination as lead...
Nonetheless, as this affecting memoir demonstrates, chemistry in the right hands can be a powerful muse. For Levi, every compound has a distinctive personality. Hydrochloric acid "is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance . . . After having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein's movies." Chemistry's periodic table, which arranges the elements according to their atomic number, is Levi's metaphor for the relationships that compose a human life. The Periodic Table consists of 21 episodes, most...
...never combining with other elements. They spoke the rough Piedmontese dialect inlaid with Hebrew --"sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier." As deftly translated by Raymond Rosenthal, the oddities of speech are a delight. So is the "inexplicable imprecation" for which Levi's great-grandfather was famous: "May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella...
...Levi's initiation into chemistry's ordered universe came in the late 1930s as chaos threatened the world. While Mussolini mimicked Hitler's menacing rhetoric, the Jewish student sought relief in science from "all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, and all the imperatives" of Fascism. His comrade in this search for verifiable values was Sandro, a peasant youth who later became a celebrated resistance fighter. Sandro dragged Levi on exhausting treks through mountain passes, up rock cliffs and over slopes of ice. "He felt the need," Levi says, "to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for an iron future...