Ian Thomson (2)

One of the problems with being in Auschwitz – not the major problem, of course, but one of them – is that once you’ve gone through that, all the rest of your life, before and since, must seem tepid in comparison. Primo Levi came from a middle-class Turin family, and did all the things young men growing up anywhere do – played in the street, went to school, flirted shyly with the girls, went on to college, and prepared for a scientific career by graduating with high honors in chemistry. Unfortunately, politics intervened. At first, the Fascists did not discriminate against Jews – in fact, many were prominent in the organization, including some of Levi’s personal friends. However, as Mussolini got more and more cuddly with Hitler, things changed. First Jews were expelled from the Party, then from government office, and then more or less banned from anything. Levi managed to eke out a living by working as a chemist in a remote mountain asbestos mine. When Italy surrendered to the Allies, Italian Jews thought their problems were solved – and for those in Allied controlled areas, they were. Alas, the north became a Nazi puppet state. Levi and his friend joined a resistance group, which turned out to be good on revolutionary theorizing but poor at taking action. They were quickly betrayed by an infiltrator, rounded up and taken to a concentration camp. At first that wasn’t too bad either; then one day the boxcars came.


You weren’t supposed to last very long in Auschwitz; the only way to do so, even temporarily, was to find some way to make yourself useful to the proprietors. Thus, came the Kapos – the Jewish barracks leaders who had to be more cruel than the Nazis in order to survive themselves and the men who dragged bodies out of the gas chambers to the crematoria. Levi’s personal break came when the Germans looked for chemists to work at Monowitz-Buna, the synthetic rubber factory attached to the Auschwitz complex; eighty people sat for a chemistry exam; three passed. One was Levi. The tiny benefits of the chemistry lab – it was warmer than the barracks and there were chemicals and glassware that could be stolen and traded for food – (see “Cerium” in The Periodic Table). That kept Levi alive long enough to get scarlet fever. He was left to die in the camp infirmary, while the remaining slave laborers were marched west. The SS prepared to deal with the infirmary, but the camp came under Russian artillery fire and they panicked and fled. Levi staggered out of the infirmary to find a scene from Bosch – a burning death camp covered with snow and littered with corpses. After a considerable delay being shuttled around eastern Europe – as far as the Soviets were concerned, he was still an enemy alien – he arrived back home.


Levi eventually found a job as a chemist in a paint factory, and gradually began to write about his experiences. His book If This Is A Man (Survival in Auschwitz in America) got critical acclaim (although it didn’t sell very many copies). Levi married and had a family, who all lived in the family apartment at 75 Corso Re Umburto. Levi’s mother – you should avoid stereotypes, but there you have it – demanded an immense amount of his time and her relations with Levi’s wife were tense. Levi continued to write – perhaps to escape home life – and continued to spend a lot of time at the paint factory – perhaps for the same reason. More books emerged: The Reawakening, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and The Saved, Moments of Reprieve, If Not Now, When?, science fiction short stories, and a newspaper column. He gradually accrued international fame, although his ability to travel was restricted by his devotion to his mother. He became disillusioned with Communism and Israel, and looked with anxiety at neoFascism. He was diagnosed with depression, and one day in 1987 stepped on to the landing of his apartment and threw himself head first down the stairwell.


Ian Thomson’s biography Primo Levi has a matter-of-fact style that is reminiscent of Levi himself. Thomson’s research is amazing, and the amount of detail is almost intimidating; the account of Levi’s capture, confinement, transport and life in Auschwitz is almost as harrowing as Levi’s own. The main flaw is although Thomson does more than justice to Levi as a human and a writer, he can’t quite grasp Levi as a scientist. Levi was not a famous researcher but his own accounts of industrial chemistry carry the frustration and fascination of solving everyday chemical problems – why is this batch of enamel perfect but that one, apparently made identically, lumpy? Why does this paint dry smoothly but that one dries with tiny bubbles? Primo Levi is one of the few writers that can cross the border between science and literature – Loren Eisley and Thomas Pynchon are the only others I can readily think of – and the only one I know of that deals sympathetically with industrial processes. He can literally make watching paint dry sound fascinating. It's sad that he never finished his organic chemistry book, The Double Bond.


My favorite of Levi’s books is, as you may imagine from the above, is The Periodic Table, but from my general policy of not reviewing books unless I’ve read them recently the one I’ll do here is The Monkey’s Wrench. The very title is unfortunate; in Italian it’s La chaive a stella, “The Star-Shaped Key”, and means a socket wrench; the American title makes it sound primitive and a little ridiculous instead of a precision tool. The book is a series of stories told by Tino Faussone, an Italian construction rigger, to an anonymous but clearly autobiographical chemist while both are at a construction site in the Soviet Union. In a way it does for construction work what The Periodic Table did for chemistry. Tino Faussone is based on an Italian Levi met in Auschwitz who was working as a “volunteer” for the Reich (which meant he got better food, more comfortable barracks, and was not in danger of being killed). Tino’s anecdotes are funny and sad, but they all display the same sort of problem-solving skills that Levi has. Tino builds a bridge in India, a drilling rig in Alaska, and a petrochemical cracking tower in Italy, and it’s always interesting. In the last chapter, Levi returns as himself and explains why he’s in the USSR; a shipment of enamel keeps coming out lumpy. There’s methodical work needed to find out why, and it turns out to be… Well, I won’t spoil it for you. All of Levi’s work is recommended; I wish some of his scifi stories were available in English.
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Thompson does a fantastic job covering a nation difficult for most outsiders to understand. Lots of historical details, presented in context to the places he's visiting (situation encountered), so that it's rarely dry or overwhelming; he goes off the beaten path often for stories in such remote areas even Haitians are daunted by his plans. Those reading the book for voodoo details might be somewhat disappointed - Thomson does get an entry to that "scene", though near the end, in basically one chapter. On the other hand, he does meet a zombie, doing a terrific job of explaining the background details of that "phenomenon". Highly recommended.… (más)