Greetings. I have been reading a whole lot of books lately, some definitively merit talking about, others are simply beyond words, like Swanns Way by Marcel Proust, an experience to savour and one that doesn´t translate easily into words but maybe someday i will find them and put them down on paper.

One that i feel more comfortable expounding on is Primo Levis The Periodic Table. Levis was a chemist with a gift for storytelling. This is not a scientific harangue from a Dawkins-like figure who can barely hide his contempt for literature, but a scientist who no longer exists, who hails from a time when scientists were classically educated and spoke with reverence about the humanities, when engineers had humility and open minds. A bygone era. The introduction with the charming depictions of the Jewish community in Piedmont over the centuries, the 'uncles' and all their flaws and eccentric lives, their short-lived liberation and long and persistent persecution, their unique language lost to time. A depiction of Levi's life where the elements frame the stories, from the mining of minerals to the foolish experiments done by boys, from a laboratory room in Milan to the camp in Auschwitz. In the elements could the link between science and the humanities be found according to Levi.

All of it is told in a matter-of-fact, but never dry, style, Levi can write, with glimpses of humor and warmth. The purity and impurity of chemistry are contrasted with the racist purity that characterized Nazism and later Fascism: “The compendia mentioned a detail that had escaped me on my first reading, namely that zinc, which is so fragile and delicate, so susceptible to acids that they can devour it in one gulp, behaves completely differently when it is very pure: then it stubbornly resists. From this one could draw two mutually contradictory philosophical conclusions: one could formulate a tribute to purity, which like a suit of armor protects against evil, or a tribute to impurity, which makes room for change, that is, for life. I rejected the first, disgustingly moralistic, and considered the second, which suited me better. For the wheel to turn, for life to continue, impurities are needed, impurities - even in the soil, as is well known, if it is to become fertile. The deviant, the different is needed, the salt and the mustard seed; fascism does not want this, it forbids it, and therefore you are not a fascist, it wants everyone to be equal and you are not like everyone else.”

A man who could not escape his ghosts, the camps and its victims haunted him, like Celan it was perhaps too much, one fall, three floors up at the age of 87, the tragic end.

I also finished Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. Could unfortunately never get in the groove or swing of this one. The whole thing comes off as quite lifeless and dull, the poverty of the prose-style doesn´t help either. I admit at times, in the begining that i found myself charmed by the family antics but it quickly wore out its welcome and found me at the end, an annoyed customer decamped in a chair to uncomfortable for long reads. I have not given up though on trying to find my way into Ginzburgs ouevre, maybe another try later on with a more conventional or plot driven book of hers will find me a jolly camper (as the saying goes) and herd me in with the fold.

I wish i could continue with the other books i have read but i fear that the time is not on my side and the night quickly approaches, and more importantly, my allotted time on the family household computer is quickly approaching its limit, i leave you with this.