DISCOVERIES

UNCLE TUNGSTEN Memories of a Chemical Boyhood; By Oliver Sacks; Alfred A. Knopf: 318 pp., $25

Books by Oliver Sacks, from “Migraine” to “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” to “Seeing Voices” and “Island of the Colorblind,” have their very own alchemy. They’re a blend of physiology and psychology, biology and chemistry, rationality and irrationality. He gives us a context for what we call disease and leaves us wondering if we are stuck in the past or lost in the future. In this partial memoir, seen through the lens of Sacks’ lifelong love for chemistry, the writer gives us an insight into the images, fears and desires that shaped his intelligence.

Born in 1933 in London, the youngest of four, Sacks came from inquisitive stock. Both of his parents were physicians, and the entire extended family--aunts, uncles and cousins--were scientists of some kind: Auntie Len “the botanical aunt,” Uncle Abe “the physics uncle” and the centerpiece of this memoir, Uncle Dave, “the chemical uncle” who “manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire.”

His home was less a home than a rambling labyrinth of secret rooms filled with strange potions and solitary objects. Picture a library filled with such books as “Tumours, Innocent and Malignant,” a basement filled with smoking beakers and doors that opened onto operations in progress. At 6, Sacks was sent to a boarding school, as were many other children whose parents hoped to save them from the Blitz. His boarding school, run by a sado-masochist who regularly beat the children, was a nightmare worthy of Charlotte Bronte or Charles Dickens. Sacks soon lost any tenuous ideas that God might exist and saw firsthand how “violence contaminated human nature.” To survive beatings he would think of his tormentor as “only atoms.”

Home in 1943, he went on rounds with his father and played with metals and minerals such as scheelite, osmiridium and tantalum. “Uncle Tungsten” contains a brief history of some of the world’s leading chemists and the story of how lightbulbs were invented and evolved. By 15, Sacks “ceased to carry [his] pocket spectroscope” and turned to medicine, then neurology. Sacks’ facts are bold and fascinating, but it is his adjectives that course through a reader’s bloodstream.

*

RENOIR, MY FATHER; By Jean Renoir, Translated from the French by Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver; New York Review Books: 438 pp., $16.95

Readers who know and love this book, first published in 1958, will now be delighted to find it more easily. It is truly a liberating book, best read at a juncture, where bravery and integrity are called for, or at a moment of creative crisis. It is a collection of memories and conversation between the filmmaker Jean Renoir and his father, conducted in 1915, when Renoir Jr. came home from the war wounded at 21, and his father, Auguste Renoir, increasingly paralyzed, was 74. There are portraits of Auguste’s many friends: the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, Pissarro, Manet, Cezanne. There are also the now famous, scathing reactions to Impressionism by the critics. Jean is full of respect for Auguste’s simplicity, his economy of means, his insistence that “[o]ne is merely a cork.... You must let yourself go along in life like a cork in the current of a stream.” Jean includes some of his father’s “eternal truths,” like: “throw away your compasses, otherwise there is no art.” He writes a portrait of his father’s still core that describes something deeper about art and artists, no matter their medium.

*

LOVING PICASSO The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier; By Fernande Olivier, Translated from the French by Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn; Abrams: 296 pp., $35

We know loving Picasso wasn’t fun. The women who survived without committing suicide are to be commended for their bravery in the face of “genius.” Perhaps Fernande Olivier, whose real name was Amelie Lang, survived because she was the first, outside of his mother and sisters, whom Picasso was ever close to. He was 22 when he met her in 1904. She had already died a thousand deaths as the unwanted child of a married man and a young girl. She was raised by an aunt who did not love her and forced into marriage at 18 (in 1899) with a man who beat her so badly she ran away to Paris in 1900 to become an artist’s model. That is how she met Picasso, moving in with him in 1905 and living as his model--and in many ways his protector--until they split in 1912. She began this diary when she was 15. There is a picture of Montmartre in the early 1900s that blossoms until Picasso’s darkness begins to eclipse his muse.