This is not a book review

By Pablo Toledo

Buenos Aires Herald staff

(este artículo salió en la edición del Buenos Aires Herald del 27/4/12)

This is not a book review. A book review would tell you that there is a new book out, that it’s called Química hasta en la sopa, that it’s been published by Iamiqué (a singular Argentine publisher, specializing in science books for children with readers all over the Spanish-speaking world and beyond). In a book review you would hear about how the book follows on the footsteps of a long tradition of books that show you how a given science is all around us: in this case, how a chemistry-loving girl spends a day with her non-scientific sister Marina and shows her the million ways in which the things they do (from drinking mate to printing a receipt) can be explained in a way that is both scientific and cool.

But this is where the book review ends, and, remember, I told you from the beginning: this is not a book review. Because the writer of the book is Silvana Fucito. The name may not mean much to you, but it does mean the world to me and a small group of people who cannot help but look at this book with a warm glow of pride that fills our chest just as a mighty kick to the stomach takes our breath away.

At the end of the third volume of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins tells his friend Samwise Gamgee “It’s been four years to the day since Weathertop, Sam. It’s never really healed” (Weathertop, for those who don’t remember their Middle Earth history,  was the place where Frodo got his first battle wound when he was stabbed by a Ringwraith). Well, it’s never really healed: it’s been four years to the day since Silvana died in a car accident.

Or did she? “Accident” implies that there were unforeseeable consequences, that Fate got in the way, that it was nobody’s fault. She was driving her car back from Luján on a Sunday evening. A truck loaded with soy had driven by the same spot. Someone had been sloppy about securing the cargo, and some grain spilled off when the truck took a turn. Have you ever seen soy? Its pellets look just like ball bearings. Imagine driving over them out of the blue. She lost control of the car. You can picture the rest – I’ve been trying not to every day for the past four years.

So, even if there was no intent, in my mind it’s never been an accident. Somewhere, someone knows they did a lousy job that day, someone who was in a rush or too tired or too stupid to care. A driver who had a hunch something was wrong, who maybe even got warned that night that he was short a few kilos. The officer who was first on the scene told the family there was so much soy on the road he had difficulty walking without taking a spill. It was dusk.

I was at the paper at that very moment, and only found out the next morning. I was listening to a song by the Asturian band Felpeyu: I played it five times on my iPod and googled the lyrics, and all the time I was thinking “I’ll call Silvana tomorrow, we have to get together and sing this: she’s gonna love it.” She loved singing. She loved Celtic music, Lord of the Rings, elves and fairies, Disney movies, playing the piano. She loved tea, books, films. She could sit for hours listening to music, chatting, sharing life tea after mate after tea. She loved her friends, and she had many.

She loved chemistry, she loved explaining it to people as hopeless at it as me and her sister Marina (and she was good at it – without her I would still be flunking my high school courses). When she spoke of it, it was nothing like a hard science or a dull subject. If I were writing a review, I would say that the book transmits that joy – because I am not, I will just say that it is good to meet some of her again on the page, even if it does stir so many feelings.

More than anything in this universe, she loved her son Theo. He was three then.

She was so, so very much loved.

So, get your kids the book, because she’s in there and you’ll be touched by someone I’d love to be able to introduce you to. I would never write any of this in a book review, but this is not it, and if you’ve put up with me this far you already know that.

As for me, I’ll be listening to D’equí a Somió, the song I never got to hear her sing. God, she would have loved it.