The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
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The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is an impassioned response to the Holocaust: consisting of twenty one short stories, each possessing the name of a chemical element, the collection tells of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian chemist before, during and after Auschwitz in luminous, clear, and unfailingly beautiful prose. It has been named the best science book ever by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and is considered to be Levi's crowning achievement.Tags
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A grad school colleague, knowing of my interest in literature and science, recommended this book to me. I couple years later I bought it so I could scan a couple chapters and teach it in my "vision of science"–themed academic writing class. Based on a quick skim, I selected a couple that looked good to teach, but this did not happen; a couple weeks into the course, it became clear to me I had assigned too much reading, and I dropped the readings from the schedule, much to my students' relief. But of course I chucked the book onto my reading list, and some six years later I have finally gotten around to it.
The book consists of twenty-one chapters, each titled after an element of the periodic table. They cover Levi's life, from his show more childhood to his adulthood, with a particular emphasis on his career as an industrial chemist and some discussion of his time in a concentration camp (which he covered in more detail elsewhere), but also a number of embedded narratives about other people.
It's my first work by Levi, and an interesting one. Like a lot of collections, I did not glom onto every story but there were a number of good ones. A lot of the stuff about Levi's young attempt to get into chemistry are quite funny, especially his attempts at romance, and there's an interesting tale of his attempt to solve contamination at a chemical site.
But it is also, of course, a book about fascism and how it affects our lives. I found this passage from "Potassium" about the certainty of chemistry fascinating:
Or is there? Later, in "Chromium," he solves a bit of a scientific mystery and imparts to his coworkers a new process they have to follow to avoid contamination issues. Years later, he has long left that plant, but the process remains:
The best story in the book is "Vanadium," where Levi bumps into a German chemist he knows from the concentration camp. Levi wants to find the man a monster against which to validate himself; the German chemist wants to use Levi to vindicate himself as someone who really was not that bad. Neither gets what he wants—it's a really touching meditation on complicity and blame. It ends kind of uncertainly, but how else could it? show less
The book consists of twenty-one chapters, each titled after an element of the periodic table. They cover Levi's life, from his show more childhood to his adulthood, with a particular emphasis on his career as an industrial chemist and some discussion of his time in a concentration camp (which he covered in more detail elsewhere), but also a number of embedded narratives about other people.
It's my first work by Levi, and an interesting one. Like a lot of collections, I did not glom onto every story but there were a number of good ones. A lot of the stuff about Levi's young attempt to get into chemistry are quite funny, especially his attempts at romance, and there's an interesting tale of his attempt to solve contamination at a chemical site.
But it is also, of course, a book about fascism and how it affects our lives. I found this passage from "Potassium" about the certainty of chemistry fascinating:
the Fascism around us did not have opponents. We had to begin from scratch, 'invent' our anti-Fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to use sources of certainty.We may like to think of science as source of certainty in an uncertain world, but Levi argues that the truths of science are as arbitrary the truths of humans when you come down to it—there is nothing to be found in science that will let you resist fascism.
[...]
Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide or methyl violet... was amusing, even exhilarating, but... [w]hy in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo [school] the truth revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. (43-4)
Or is there? Later, in "Chromium," he solves a bit of a scientific mystery and imparts to his coworkers a new process they have to follow to avoid contamination issues. Years later, he has long left that plant, but the process remains:
my report went the way of all flesh: but formulas are as holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. As so my ammonium chloride... by now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore. (133)There's an odd sort of hope in this, tinged with melancholy. The good you do can linger for a long time... albeit until it has become actively harmful in its own way! Humans cling on to revealed truths, for good or for ill—this is probably the lasting lesson of fascism, religion, science, and The Periodic Table.
The best story in the book is "Vanadium," where Levi bumps into a German chemist he knows from the concentration camp. Levi wants to find the man a monster against which to validate himself; the German chemist wants to use Levi to vindicate himself as someone who really was not that bad. Neither gets what he wants—it's a really touching meditation on complicity and blame. It ends kind of uncertainly, but how else could it? show less
Primo Levi may or may not have committed suicide in 1987 and it is all too convenient for myth-makers to say, as Elie Wiesel did, that Levi had died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.
However, there is one section of this book - Vanadium - where one understands the possibility of existential despair for Levi, his exchange with a German who was 'on the other side' at Auschwitz.
It is not that the German was wholly obtuse and certainly the man knows that bad things were done. By all 'conventional' standards, he is not a 'bad man' - indeed, he reminds one of Arendt's description of evil as fundamentally banal.
But the world views of victim and (relatively) minor participant are so utterly different that the only conclusion to be drawn is that show more empathy is always going to be the human exception rather than the human rule.
The Royal Institution awarded this book the title of 'best science book ever written' in 2006 (it was written in 1975) but it isn't. This is pure sentimentality - rather it is a very well written series of memoirs and some stories, hung together around a scientific theme.
It is, in fact, a bit of a mish-mash and it is perhaps time to 'toughen up' and stop missing the point. If Levi was defined by his experience in Auschwitz, the world has colluded out of what can only be described as a mass guilt trip that, I think, insults the dead.
We know now that - separated from the eurocentric view that rediscovered Nazi attrocities in the 1960s and after - the human species is capable of atrocity by its very nature. We live in a world of discovered and new atrocities, of Milgram experiments and Rwanda.
Primo Levi's testimony is important because he was in the heart of hell but we diminish him by patronising him. He does not come to terms with anything in this book and we should not either - we cannot 'empathise' or believe we have any conception of what he experienced.
Indeed, that is the flaw of the book - a set of incidents for which the periodic table is an excuse skirt around the elephant in the room, a 'why' that has no answer.
It is as if he is clearing his mental deck of thoughts and memories but we come out none the wiser as to the reality. We are filled with sympathy but blocked from anything but a very sentimentalised empathy.
At the end of this book, I deeply cared about this man - not humanity - but this man and in that sense the book is a success insofar as it helps us see each victim of these grinding machines to be a person.
But it takes us no nearer to coherence or understanding. The lack of anger or rage in itself seems to be taken as a good sign, that Levi was not a man who hated or seeked vengeance. I disagree.
The sweet reasonableness is what most people want to see but it does not look like a truth, only a repression out of confusion. Levi never ever says he forgives here or elsewhere. He is simply pining in 'Vanadium' for a German to understand what it is to be Primo Levi.
The tragedy is not only that the German does not understand what it is to be Primo Levi but, bluntly, none of us do. If we claim to do, because of his fine writing, then we are self-deluding liars.
The praise and the awards and the claims about the man are almost piling insult on injury. No one understands what it is to be Primo Levi any more than anyone can understand who it is to be me or you.
Atrocity is now understand to be common enough - Stalin and Mao were both responsible for more deaths than Hitler. It cannot be great to be in Guantanamo or see your family blown to bits in a drone attack or macheted in Rwanda - but each person in each atrocity is unique.
Worse, the dead person no longer suffers - only those left behind suffer and we cannot 'get' this essential injustice where we cannot be sure whether it is better to be alive or dead.
So, Levi is important because of what he fails to be able to say not because of what he actually says.
Who knows what he thought on the night of his death but it is a fair guess that he would have given up all his writing just to know that someone, anyone, could actually communicate that they knew precisely what he had become because of the cold brutality of others.
It just can't be done. So, by all means read this book and get what you can from it (including insights into life in pre-war Italy) but do not expect to really understand what is going on here.
Or, at the least, read and re-read 'Vanadium' and be humbled at the inexpressible sadness of the human condition. Sometimes, all that is left is a respectful loving silence. Literature is an ambiguous friend in such circumstances. show less
However, there is one section of this book - Vanadium - where one understands the possibility of existential despair for Levi, his exchange with a German who was 'on the other side' at Auschwitz.
It is not that the German was wholly obtuse and certainly the man knows that bad things were done. By all 'conventional' standards, he is not a 'bad man' - indeed, he reminds one of Arendt's description of evil as fundamentally banal.
But the world views of victim and (relatively) minor participant are so utterly different that the only conclusion to be drawn is that show more empathy is always going to be the human exception rather than the human rule.
The Royal Institution awarded this book the title of 'best science book ever written' in 2006 (it was written in 1975) but it isn't. This is pure sentimentality - rather it is a very well written series of memoirs and some stories, hung together around a scientific theme.
It is, in fact, a bit of a mish-mash and it is perhaps time to 'toughen up' and stop missing the point. If Levi was defined by his experience in Auschwitz, the world has colluded out of what can only be described as a mass guilt trip that, I think, insults the dead.
We know now that - separated from the eurocentric view that rediscovered Nazi attrocities in the 1960s and after - the human species is capable of atrocity by its very nature. We live in a world of discovered and new atrocities, of Milgram experiments and Rwanda.
Primo Levi's testimony is important because he was in the heart of hell but we diminish him by patronising him. He does not come to terms with anything in this book and we should not either - we cannot 'empathise' or believe we have any conception of what he experienced.
Indeed, that is the flaw of the book - a set of incidents for which the periodic table is an excuse skirt around the elephant in the room, a 'why' that has no answer.
It is as if he is clearing his mental deck of thoughts and memories but we come out none the wiser as to the reality. We are filled with sympathy but blocked from anything but a very sentimentalised empathy.
At the end of this book, I deeply cared about this man - not humanity - but this man and in that sense the book is a success insofar as it helps us see each victim of these grinding machines to be a person.
But it takes us no nearer to coherence or understanding. The lack of anger or rage in itself seems to be taken as a good sign, that Levi was not a man who hated or seeked vengeance. I disagree.
The sweet reasonableness is what most people want to see but it does not look like a truth, only a repression out of confusion. Levi never ever says he forgives here or elsewhere. He is simply pining in 'Vanadium' for a German to understand what it is to be Primo Levi.
The tragedy is not only that the German does not understand what it is to be Primo Levi but, bluntly, none of us do. If we claim to do, because of his fine writing, then we are self-deluding liars.
The praise and the awards and the claims about the man are almost piling insult on injury. No one understands what it is to be Primo Levi any more than anyone can understand who it is to be me or you.
Atrocity is now understand to be common enough - Stalin and Mao were both responsible for more deaths than Hitler. It cannot be great to be in Guantanamo or see your family blown to bits in a drone attack or macheted in Rwanda - but each person in each atrocity is unique.
Worse, the dead person no longer suffers - only those left behind suffer and we cannot 'get' this essential injustice where we cannot be sure whether it is better to be alive or dead.
So, Levi is important because of what he fails to be able to say not because of what he actually says.
Who knows what he thought on the night of his death but it is a fair guess that he would have given up all his writing just to know that someone, anyone, could actually communicate that they knew precisely what he had become because of the cold brutality of others.
It just can't be done. So, by all means read this book and get what you can from it (including insights into life in pre-war Italy) but do not expect to really understand what is going on here.
Or, at the least, read and re-read 'Vanadium' and be humbled at the inexpressible sadness of the human condition. Sometimes, all that is left is a respectful loving silence. Literature is an ambiguous friend in such circumstances. show less
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, was surprisingly different in tone and structure to his very well know book, "If I was a Man' or the American title 'Survival in Auschwitz' - which I bought when I arrived in Canada, not realizing it was the same work. In 2006, "The Periodic Table' was named the best science book ever written. It fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.
Levi was a writer, scientist, moralist, poet and philospher. He comes across his pages as a person unable to be categorized, struggling with past sufferings and ongoing torments. One of the most anguishing parts of the show more book is when he describes his communications with a German scientist he worked under in Auschwitz, and it is this tone that takes me back to his previous memoir. However, there is slightly more anger and a tone of impatience in this short story, that made me think that Levi the man has never found peace with his past. And possibly he should not, either. Indeed, he commits suicide several years after 'The Periodic Table' is written, apparently unable to come to terms with the world's forgetfulness of the Holocaust. Searching in bookstores for his two early memoirs, indeed they are impossible to find and buy, unless second-hand.
Born in Turin in 1919, Levi earned a doctorate in chemistry and spent most of his life as an industrial chemist, helping to formulate enamels and varnishes. In February 1944, Levi and the other 600 Jews at the prison camp in Fossoli were loaded on transports to Auschwitz. Five hundred of them — the old and sick, women and children — were gassed immediately on arrival. Of the remaining able-bodied men, about 20 survived until the end of the war.
The Periodic Table was published in 1975, and varies immensely from his memoirs. It cleverly fuses the different aspects of Levi's life - chemistry, memoir, ethics, with reflection on the Holocaust. It is almost poetic in parts, with a philosophical bent that marries together with his scientific knowledge beautifully. Levi descibes his work as a chemist, his struggle with matter and its relationship to his soul.
There are twenty one stories, based metaphorically on the elements of the Periodic Table, and chronologically ordered to reflect Levi's life — two early short stories are inserted at the point in Levi's life when they were written — but they are independent and don't pretend to be autobiographical.
++POSSIBLE SPOILER++
The first chapter is a heavier, wordier read that the rest of the book, and talks of the inertness of "Argon", reflecting on Levi's ancestors, whom he considers 'noble, inert and rare': the alien who migrated from Spain to the Piedmont without forming bonds with their fellow Italians.
Some of the titles, Lead, Mercury, Sulphur, head chapters of fantasy or near-fiction. Others stand both as metaphor and as strict truth.
In "Potassium" he tells of a fortunate chance of research work when the racial laws prohibited it. He learns the hard way that although potassium is 'almost' sodium in the periodic table, it won't substitute for it. 'One must distrust the almost-the-same, the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork. The difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switchpoints. The chemists trade consists in good part of being aware of those differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade.'
The Auschwitz story is represented only by one chapter, "Cerium". In this, prisoner 174517 having tried to keep alive by making fatty acids in the laboratory, and fritters out of sanitary cotton, steals three hard, colourless tasteless rods from a jar and identifies them as iron-cerium, the alloy from which lighter flints were made: he and another thinned them down and sold them, keeping alive for the two months until liberation.
"Potassium" and "Hydrogen" centre on experiments Levi did as a student, "Nickel" on work at a nickel mine, and "Phosphorus" on an improbable romance with a laboratory co-worker in wartime Milan.
"Vanadium" is about a post-war encounter with one of the German scientists encountered while working there as a slave. "Arsenic", "Nitrogen", and "Tin" are about adventures as a free-lance chemical consultant and "Chromium" and "Silver" are industrial detective stories, in which chemical problems are solved.
"Carbon" follows a carbon atom around the planet, as the final to his work and a kind of allegorical ending to fit the idea of a circle of life.
In the fourth chapter, entitled "Iron", he explains the philosophy of his science:
'... and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in leceo: and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.'pg 40.
When I read this paragraph, I was completely gob-smacked. Amazed, enthralled and totally engaged for the rest of the book. Primo Levi had again struck me as one of those incredibly intelligent, enquiring and good people that you aspire to meet and wish to emulate to some small degree, and he caught me up after this and swept me to the end of the book in very short order.
My favourite chapters were 'Phosporus', 'Cerium' and 'Chromium' and 'Vanadium' and I rushed back to re-read these three after finishing. In 'Cerium', talking about his great friend Alberto:
'He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it's a matter of launching it. ....Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them,: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.'
pg143.
In "Chromium", Levi gives his most poignant reason for writing:
"The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me: I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune. I was writing concise and bloody poems, telling the story at breakneck speed, either by talking to people or by writing it down, so much so that gradually a book was later born: by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past."
pg 151
The saddest thing is that Levi could not fulfil his ongoing needs for purification, as he felt people had stopped listening. He died in spite of it all. show less
Levi was a writer, scientist, moralist, poet and philospher. He comes across his pages as a person unable to be categorized, struggling with past sufferings and ongoing torments. One of the most anguishing parts of the show more book is when he describes his communications with a German scientist he worked under in Auschwitz, and it is this tone that takes me back to his previous memoir. However, there is slightly more anger and a tone of impatience in this short story, that made me think that Levi the man has never found peace with his past. And possibly he should not, either. Indeed, he commits suicide several years after 'The Periodic Table' is written, apparently unable to come to terms with the world's forgetfulness of the Holocaust. Searching in bookstores for his two early memoirs, indeed they are impossible to find and buy, unless second-hand.
Born in Turin in 1919, Levi earned a doctorate in chemistry and spent most of his life as an industrial chemist, helping to formulate enamels and varnishes. In February 1944, Levi and the other 600 Jews at the prison camp in Fossoli were loaded on transports to Auschwitz. Five hundred of them — the old and sick, women and children — were gassed immediately on arrival. Of the remaining able-bodied men, about 20 survived until the end of the war.
The Periodic Table was published in 1975, and varies immensely from his memoirs. It cleverly fuses the different aspects of Levi's life - chemistry, memoir, ethics, with reflection on the Holocaust. It is almost poetic in parts, with a philosophical bent that marries together with his scientific knowledge beautifully. Levi descibes his work as a chemist, his struggle with matter and its relationship to his soul.
There are twenty one stories, based metaphorically on the elements of the Periodic Table, and chronologically ordered to reflect Levi's life — two early short stories are inserted at the point in Levi's life when they were written — but they are independent and don't pretend to be autobiographical.
++POSSIBLE SPOILER++
The first chapter is a heavier, wordier read that the rest of the book, and talks of the inertness of "Argon", reflecting on Levi's ancestors, whom he considers 'noble, inert and rare': the alien who migrated from Spain to the Piedmont without forming bonds with their fellow Italians.
Some of the titles, Lead, Mercury, Sulphur, head chapters of fantasy or near-fiction. Others stand both as metaphor and as strict truth.
In "Potassium" he tells of a fortunate chance of research work when the racial laws prohibited it. He learns the hard way that although potassium is 'almost' sodium in the periodic table, it won't substitute for it. 'One must distrust the almost-the-same, the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork. The difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switchpoints. The chemists trade consists in good part of being aware of those differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade.'
The Auschwitz story is represented only by one chapter, "Cerium". In this, prisoner 174517 having tried to keep alive by making fatty acids in the laboratory, and fritters out of sanitary cotton, steals three hard, colourless tasteless rods from a jar and identifies them as iron-cerium, the alloy from which lighter flints were made: he and another thinned them down and sold them, keeping alive for the two months until liberation.
"Potassium" and "Hydrogen" centre on experiments Levi did as a student, "Nickel" on work at a nickel mine, and "Phosphorus" on an improbable romance with a laboratory co-worker in wartime Milan.
"Vanadium" is about a post-war encounter with one of the German scientists encountered while working there as a slave. "Arsenic", "Nitrogen", and "Tin" are about adventures as a free-lance chemical consultant and "Chromium" and "Silver" are industrial detective stories, in which chemical problems are solved.
"Carbon" follows a carbon atom around the planet, as the final to his work and a kind of allegorical ending to fit the idea of a circle of life.
In the fourth chapter, entitled "Iron", he explains the philosophy of his science:
'... and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in leceo: and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.'pg 40.
When I read this paragraph, I was completely gob-smacked. Amazed, enthralled and totally engaged for the rest of the book. Primo Levi had again struck me as one of those incredibly intelligent, enquiring and good people that you aspire to meet and wish to emulate to some small degree, and he caught me up after this and swept me to the end of the book in very short order.
My favourite chapters were 'Phosporus', 'Cerium' and 'Chromium' and 'Vanadium' and I rushed back to re-read these three after finishing. In 'Cerium', talking about his great friend Alberto:
'He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it's a matter of launching it. ....Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them,: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.'
pg143.
In "Chromium", Levi gives his most poignant reason for writing:
"The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me: I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune. I was writing concise and bloody poems, telling the story at breakneck speed, either by talking to people or by writing it down, so much so that gradually a book was later born: by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past."
pg 151
The saddest thing is that Levi could not fulfil his ongoing needs for purification, as he felt people had stopped listening. He died in spite of it all. show less
Is this my new favourite author? I think so. This book sat looking pretty on my shelf for a number of years- what a mistake that was! In saying that though, now was the right time for me and this book to come together. I have recently read [If This is a Man and the Truce], and my reading of the Periodic Table benefitted from that 'backstory'.
The book is really a series of vignettes loosely based around elements on the periodic table, apt for the authors career as a chemist. It is 'sciencey', but more than that it is human. Wow, does this author have the turn of phrase mastered! He throws together complex sentences that don't sound pretentious, outlines peoples poor behaviour without being judgement, and notices things and is able to show more describe them in such lucid detail that you want to read passages again and again. I highly recommend this one. show less
The book is really a series of vignettes loosely based around elements on the periodic table, apt for the authors career as a chemist. It is 'sciencey', but more than that it is human. Wow, does this author have the turn of phrase mastered! He throws together complex sentences that don't sound pretentious, outlines peoples poor behaviour without being judgement, and notices things and is able to show more describe them in such lucid detail that you want to read passages again and again. I highly recommend this one. show less
Thomas Mann began his tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, with this sentence: "Very deep is the well of the past." Primo Levi's memoir, The Periodic Table, demonstrates this metaphor in a much smaller, compact space. The lives of Levi and his Piedmont ancestors are explored through stories that illuminate the nature of the past and the source of those people's and our own humanity. This is done through vignettes that demonstrate Levi's love of chemistry and literature, his relations and relationships, while exploring his own attitude and thoughts.
Some of his thoughts are about reading and its meaning for his life. This is a topic that I especially love to explore and learn about; I will take it up in this introductory commentary on his show more memoir. His reading is based on his love for great literature particularly his appreciation for the writings of Thomas Mann, whom he holds in the highest esteem.
Early in the narrative during his sojourn as a chemistry student he meets Rita, a fellow student, and is attracted to her although, due to his shyness, he does not know how to approach her. He reaches a point where "I thought myself condemned to a perpetual masculine solitude, denied a woman's smile forever". Yet one day he found beside her, peeking out of her bag, a book. It was The Magic Mountain. He relates, "it was my sustenance during those months, the timeless story of Hans Castorp in enchanted exile on the magic mountain. I asked Rita about it, on tenterhooks to hear her opinion, as if I had written the book: and soon enough I had to realize that she was reading the novel in an entirely different way. As a novel, in fact: she was very interested in finding out exactly how far Hans would go with Madame Chauchat, and mercilessly skipped the fascinating (for me) political, theological, and metaphysical discussions between the humanist Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Naphtha." (p 38)
We all may have had a similar experience more than once: finding someone (whether drawn to them by Eros or not) reading a book we love, but not reading the same book.
Levi's love for Mann's writing also provided him solace while working on a demanding project during the war. He was sequestered in a laboratory next to a nickel mine and forced to work long hours. He dared not venture far from the mine, so "Sometimes I stayed in the lab past quitting time or went back there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problem of nickel. At other times I shut myself in to read Mann's Joseph stories in my monastic cell in the submarine. On nights when the moon was up I often took long solitary walks through the wild countryside around the mine". (p 79)
One can picture Levi pondering while walking by the light of the Tuscan moon finding comfort as did Jacob in Mann's novel when he walked in the moonlight. It is the moonlight with its "magically ambiguous precision" that mirrored for Jacob the way the traditions of the children and grandchildren of Abraham are "spun out over generations and solidified as a chronicle only much later--". ("The Tales of Jacob")
Each chapter of the memoir is named for a chemical element, explores Levi’s work in the laboratory, and relates that work to his personal, social, and political experience. It is a cliché to speak of human chemistry when discussing human nature. The virtue of Levi’s book is that he refreshes the cliché and shows the profound connections between chemical elements and the elements of human behavior. The chapters can be read as a discrete piece of work, concentrating on some episode or period in Levi’s life. Nevertheless, the chapters are also unified by the author’s growth in perception. As he learns more about specific chemical elements and about the procedures required to study those elements, so he also discovers life in more depth, encountering unusual characters who teach him about the meaning of their lives and about existence as a whole. The form of The Periodic Table can be roughly cnaracterized as a chronology; however there are chapters which are difficult to date and some that are fictions in part or in whole. While his experience in Auschwitz is almost entirely avoided (he had written a separate book about this, If This is a Man), he does include a brief episode in the chapter "Cerium" that highlights his friendship with a young man named Alberto whi bouyed his spirits.
By titling his memoir The Periodic Table, Levi suggests that there is a structure to his writing about experience that is analogous to the way elements are analyzed in chemistry. Like the various substances the chemist tests in his laboratory, the author’s experiences have different degrees of purity, different weights, and different reactions, depending on what he uses to stimulate them. Human character in the memoir, in other words, has certain properties from the beginning, but it can be transformed in a number of ways given the changing nature of environments.
Throughout his memoir Primo Levi shares other literature and experiences as he narrates the lives of his friends, family, and ancestors. Just as he is inspired by reading Thomas Mann and the moonlight that inspired Jacob so many centuries ago he is imbued with the life of the people around him. Yes, The Periodic Table is deep, and one wonders at the lives narrated by this brilliant Jewish Italian chemist and humanist.
There are lessons to be learned in the humanity of people, but also in their frailties and foibles. Ultimately this is one of the most humane works of literature that this reader has encountered. With a unique style and appreciation for the importance of both science and literature for humanity The Periodic Table stands as a twentieth-century classic that I would recommend to all readers. show less
Some of his thoughts are about reading and its meaning for his life. This is a topic that I especially love to explore and learn about; I will take it up in this introductory commentary on his show more memoir. His reading is based on his love for great literature particularly his appreciation for the writings of Thomas Mann, whom he holds in the highest esteem.
Early in the narrative during his sojourn as a chemistry student he meets Rita, a fellow student, and is attracted to her although, due to his shyness, he does not know how to approach her. He reaches a point where "I thought myself condemned to a perpetual masculine solitude, denied a woman's smile forever". Yet one day he found beside her, peeking out of her bag, a book. It was The Magic Mountain. He relates, "it was my sustenance during those months, the timeless story of Hans Castorp in enchanted exile on the magic mountain. I asked Rita about it, on tenterhooks to hear her opinion, as if I had written the book: and soon enough I had to realize that she was reading the novel in an entirely different way. As a novel, in fact: she was very interested in finding out exactly how far Hans would go with Madame Chauchat, and mercilessly skipped the fascinating (for me) political, theological, and metaphysical discussions between the humanist Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Naphtha." (p 38)
We all may have had a similar experience more than once: finding someone (whether drawn to them by Eros or not) reading a book we love, but not reading the same book.
Levi's love for Mann's writing also provided him solace while working on a demanding project during the war. He was sequestered in a laboratory next to a nickel mine and forced to work long hours. He dared not venture far from the mine, so "Sometimes I stayed in the lab past quitting time or went back there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problem of nickel. At other times I shut myself in to read Mann's Joseph stories in my monastic cell in the submarine. On nights when the moon was up I often took long solitary walks through the wild countryside around the mine". (p 79)
One can picture Levi pondering while walking by the light of the Tuscan moon finding comfort as did Jacob in Mann's novel when he walked in the moonlight. It is the moonlight with its "magically ambiguous precision" that mirrored for Jacob the way the traditions of the children and grandchildren of Abraham are "spun out over generations and solidified as a chronicle only much later--". ("The Tales of Jacob")
Each chapter of the memoir is named for a chemical element, explores Levi’s work in the laboratory, and relates that work to his personal, social, and political experience. It is a cliché to speak of human chemistry when discussing human nature. The virtue of Levi’s book is that he refreshes the cliché and shows the profound connections between chemical elements and the elements of human behavior. The chapters can be read as a discrete piece of work, concentrating on some episode or period in Levi’s life. Nevertheless, the chapters are also unified by the author’s growth in perception. As he learns more about specific chemical elements and about the procedures required to study those elements, so he also discovers life in more depth, encountering unusual characters who teach him about the meaning of their lives and about existence as a whole. The form of The Periodic Table can be roughly cnaracterized as a chronology; however there are chapters which are difficult to date and some that are fictions in part or in whole. While his experience in Auschwitz is almost entirely avoided (he had written a separate book about this, If This is a Man), he does include a brief episode in the chapter "Cerium" that highlights his friendship with a young man named Alberto whi bouyed his spirits.
By titling his memoir The Periodic Table, Levi suggests that there is a structure to his writing about experience that is analogous to the way elements are analyzed in chemistry. Like the various substances the chemist tests in his laboratory, the author’s experiences have different degrees of purity, different weights, and different reactions, depending on what he uses to stimulate them. Human character in the memoir, in other words, has certain properties from the beginning, but it can be transformed in a number of ways given the changing nature of environments.
Throughout his memoir Primo Levi shares other literature and experiences as he narrates the lives of his friends, family, and ancestors. Just as he is inspired by reading Thomas Mann and the moonlight that inspired Jacob so many centuries ago he is imbued with the life of the people around him. Yes, The Periodic Table is deep, and one wonders at the lives narrated by this brilliant Jewish Italian chemist and humanist.
There are lessons to be learned in the humanity of people, but also in their frailties and foibles. Ultimately this is one of the most humane works of literature that this reader has encountered. With a unique style and appreciation for the importance of both science and literature for humanity The Periodic Table stands as a twentieth-century classic that I would recommend to all readers. show less
Not a science book, not at all. The elements are coathangers for Levi's literary themes. Having been a chemist makes this easier for him than the rest of us, but the literature he comes up with goes way beyond science. There is nothing dry or abstract about his memoirs or stories. Essential reading ...
Primo Levi is a writer that I've heard about for many years but never consciously read...I had some vague idea that he was a Nobel prize winner but it turned out that he had been nominated ...but apparently not awarded a Nobel Prize. The title indicated that the book was going to be about chemistry and I knew that Primo Levi was a chemist but as I started on the book it became obvious to me that it was more about Primo Levi the Jew, and Primo Levi the Auschwitz survivor and .....much less emphasised.....Primp Levi the industrial chemist working in a lab. It's put together as a series of essays with some nominal or seminal connection with one of the elements. There appears to be no "Periodic" table connection to his selection of elements show more and he only covers 21 out of approximately 118 elements so, in a sense, the selection of elements is rather arbitrary.
However, having spent a good portion of my student days in laboratories...not all that different from the ones that Primo describes: ...."in the course of systematic analysis, conscientiously let loose into the air a good dose of hydrochloric acid and ammonia, so that a dense, hoary mist of ammonium chloride stagnated permanently in the lab".....And his observation that "it didn't seem fair that the world should know everything about how the doctor, prostitute, sailor assassin, countess, ancient Roman conspirator and Polynesian lives and know nothing about we, who transform matter, live".....He wanted "to tell the stories of the solitary chemist, unarmed and on foot....". He's right....I don't think, anywhere else, have I ever read about the experience of being in and working in a laboratory. (Maybe a little....very little in "The double Helix" by James Watson and maybe a little....very little in "The two cultures" by CP Snow.....but Levi manages to evoke the atmosphere of the laboratory extraordinarily well).
The powerful underlying theme of his Jewishness in Nazi Italy is a constant throughout...even long after the war when he gets a letter from Muller about Vanadium. I guess, that sort of treatment and experience leaves indelible scars. It's interesting how the two strands of his themes are interwoven......the analytical chemistry (and the detective work involved with that) with his Jewishness and the loneliness and ostracism that this brought. I guess, in one sense, his knowledge of chemistry was what singled him out for preferential treatment at Auschwitz....and probably preserved his life. (I recall reading "Man's search for meaning" by Victor Frankl....and it seemed to me that his status and knowledge as a Doctor...likewise gave him preferential treatment and probably preserved his life).
Maybe....Levi is a bit weak with his biochemistry in his story about carbon....... but he admits his word picture of photosynthesis is watered down and rather mysterious ....but then the book was first published in 1975 and a lot has been learned since then. And, to give him his due, he makes no claims about biochemistry. His story is that of the analytical chemist.
Oh, I did learn, to my surprise, that argon is thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide in the air. ....and if all of humanity.....all 250 million tons of us were spread over the surface of the world....the thickness would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimetre. ...."our very presence on the earth becomes laughable in geometric terms."
I really enjoyed the book and happy to give it five stars. show less
However, having spent a good portion of my student days in laboratories...not all that different from the ones that Primo describes: ...."in the course of systematic analysis, conscientiously let loose into the air a good dose of hydrochloric acid and ammonia, so that a dense, hoary mist of ammonium chloride stagnated permanently in the lab".....And his observation that "it didn't seem fair that the world should know everything about how the doctor, prostitute, sailor assassin, countess, ancient Roman conspirator and Polynesian lives and know nothing about we, who transform matter, live".....He wanted "to tell the stories of the solitary chemist, unarmed and on foot....". He's right....I don't think, anywhere else, have I ever read about the experience of being in and working in a laboratory. (Maybe a little....very little in "The double Helix" by James Watson and maybe a little....very little in "The two cultures" by CP Snow.....but Levi manages to evoke the atmosphere of the laboratory extraordinarily well).
The powerful underlying theme of his Jewishness in Nazi Italy is a constant throughout...even long after the war when he gets a letter from Muller about Vanadium. I guess, that sort of treatment and experience leaves indelible scars. It's interesting how the two strands of his themes are interwoven......the analytical chemistry (and the detective work involved with that) with his Jewishness and the loneliness and ostracism that this brought. I guess, in one sense, his knowledge of chemistry was what singled him out for preferential treatment at Auschwitz....and probably preserved his life. (I recall reading "Man's search for meaning" by Victor Frankl....and it seemed to me that his status and knowledge as a Doctor...likewise gave him preferential treatment and probably preserved his life).
Maybe....Levi is a bit weak with his biochemistry in his story about carbon....... but he admits his word picture of photosynthesis is watered down and rather mysterious ....but then the book was first published in 1975 and a lot has been learned since then. And, to give him his due, he makes no claims about biochemistry. His story is that of the analytical chemist.
Oh, I did learn, to my surprise, that argon is thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide in the air. ....and if all of humanity.....all 250 million tons of us were spread over the surface of the world....the thickness would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimetre. ...."our very presence on the earth becomes laughable in geometric terms."
I really enjoyed the book and happy to give it five stars. show less
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Author Information
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Primo Levi was born on July 31, 1919 in Turin, Italy. He pursued a career in chemistry, and spent the early years World War II as a research chemist in Milan. Upon the German invasion of northern Italy, Levi, an Italian Jew, joined an anti-fascist group and was captured and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He was able to survive show more the camp, due in part to his value to the Nazis as a chemist. After the war ended, Levi did chemistry work in a Turin paint factory while beginning his writing career. His first book, If This Is a Man (title later was changed to Survival in Auschwitz) was published in 1947 and its sequel, The Truce (later retitled The Reawakening) came out in 1958. These two books recount Levi's story of surviving concentration camp life. Levi also published poetry, short stories, and novels, some under the pen name Damianos Malabaila. His 1985, largely autobiographical work, The Periodic Table, cemented his world fame. Awards in tribute to his writing included the Kenneth B. Smilen fiction award, presented by the Jewish Museum in New York. Ironically, despite his surviving Auschwitz, Primo Levi appears to have died by suicide, in Turin on April 11, 1987. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Periodic Table
- Original title
- Il sistema periodico
- Alternate titles*
- Het periodiek systeem : verhalen van een leven
- Original publication date
- 1975
- People/Characters
- Sandro Delmastro; Giulia Vineis
- Important places
- Piedmont, Italy; Auschwitz concentration camp, Oświęcim, Lesser Poland, Poland; Turin, Piedmont, Italy
- Important events
- Holocaust (1933 | 1945)
- Epigraph*
- Ibergekumene zoress is gut zu derzajln.
Überstandene Leiden lassen sich gut erzählen. - First words
- There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.
- Blurbers
- Bellow, Saul; Eco, Umberto; Calvino, Italo; Ozick, Cynthia
- Original language
- Italian
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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