I had to think for awhile to decide which adjective seemed to best sum up Primo Levi’s writings, and finally decided on “graceful.” His stories are perfectly formed, plotted out with an introduction to set the scene, exposition to fill out the narrative, and a clear conclusion. And yet, they never feel artificial or contrived; they flow smoothly, and it is easy to imagine him telling them to friends over a glass of wine at the neighborhood trattoria.

The stories start with events from his formative years, early in the Fascist regime, when Jews were still treated as outsiders, as they always had been, but were not actively oppressed. The proscriptive laws would come later, and while Mussolini’s Italy had concentration camps and plenty of brutes and thugs, depravity for the sake of depravity was uncommon until the Nazis took over the country in 1943. In these first stories Levi studies chemistry, makes mistakes such as almost burning down the building he was in, and learns mountain climbing. He has a good eye for describing the people he meets and works with, especially their mannerisms and quirks. Even the ones who are obvious fools are treated with a light touch; Levi smiles at them but never takes away their humanity.

He treated his experience in Auschwitz in other books, and only touches on it in this one. He first describes his time in a partisan group that had more enthusiasm than aptitude, and which was quickly betrayed and rounded up by the Fascists. Levi made the mistake of admitting to one of his interrogators that he was a Jew, and was deported to Auschwitz, where he spent eleven months. This itself was an extraordinary act of survival, since few slave laborers lived through more than eight weeks of starvation, beatings, and forced labor. His chemistry skills saved him, and he got a job in the Buna artificial rubber plant, but death was never far away. He tells a story of finding and stealing a jar of iron-cerium rods, used to light oxyacetylene torches, which he and a friend ground down to make flints for cigarette lighters. Each flint could be traded for a day’s ration of bread, which meant survival for a few more weeks. They had to do the work late at night in secret, because they would have been hanged if one of the prisoner informers had told the Germans what they were doing. More by luck than anything else Levi did manage to live long enough to greet the Russians when they arrived in January 1945.

The immediate postwar years were grim throughout Europe. Levi got a job as a chemist in a factory that made paint and varnish, and worked in a partially destroyed building where every window pane was broken. The best tale in the collection takes place here, as he is asked to investigate a ruined batch of paint to see what could be done. The tale unfolds like a detective story as he investigates the problem and searches for clues. He eventually finds a solution and the batch of paint is saved. His reward is a raise and two new bicycle tires, which at a time when all consumer goods were in short supply, were probably more valuable than the money. There is even a delightfully absurd coda to the story. Years later, he learns that the factory is still applying the fix he developed, even though it was needed only for that one bad batch, and applying it to properly made paint was not only unnecessary, but lowered the quality of the product. And so it goes….

The most moving of the later stories relates an event from years after the end of the war, when Levi, in the course of routine business correspondence with one of his firm’s suppliers, realizes that he is dealing with one of the former German supervisors from the chemical plant in Auschwitz, someone Levi had interacted with during his imprisonment. Even back then Levi had considered this man clueless about the lives of the prisoners, as when he asked why they didn’t shave more often. The years since had not brought him any additional enlightenment, and when Levi asked him about the war and the camps his responses were evasive and perhaps willfully ignorant. He accepted no responsibility for his part in one of history’s darkest episodes, did not even realize that accountability was called for.

Each of the stories in this collection is built around one of the chemical elements, although chemistry plays a secondary role to Levi’s examination of humanity and circumstance. Each of them is well told and worth reading, a fitting tribute to a fine and memorable writer.

Ingenious Write-up. Simply remarkable!

Provai a leggere questo libro subito dopo l'acquisto, ma lo abbandonai.
Non ricordo perché accadde, solo andò ad aumentare la pila dei desiderati in camera mia.
Oggi l'ho finito ed ho già voglia di rileggerlo.
E' un libro multiforme, ha tantissime cose dentro, tutte diverse, tutte importanti: dalla chimica alla 'passione' di un Uomo intesa proprio come sacrificio, come direzione obbligatoria della propria indole e del proprio destino.
C'è anche la Scienza e ciò che ci spinge a ricercare, a sperimentare e nel caso di Levi a sopravvivere in una condizione fisica e psicologica impensabile ora, che il mondo si è fatto piccolo e i mass-media grandi.
Curiosità, senso d'avventura e memoria eccezionale: questo fu Levi, in ogni frangente del suo percorso.
Dovreste leggere 'Carbonio', dovreste leggere tutto ciò che ha scritto, dovreste leggere il colloquio con Roth alla fine del libro!
Ciò che ne ho capito io è questo suo disincrostarsi da ogni pensiero precostituito, politico e religioso, specialmente religioso credo, e il fatto che non venga quasi mai nominato dio in quanto tale ma forse come un 'prodotto' di natura mi fa pensare che sia importante proprio per la sua assenza.
Dovreste conoscere la scrittura asciutta e perfetta di Levi, a volte ironica ma sempre molto precisa.
Dovreste pensare, come penso io, che non si sia suicidato.
No, credo che quel giorno nella sua casa di Torino egli sia caduto, perché davvero curiosità, avventura e progettualità erano insite in lui, oltre ad una meravigliosa intelligenza e l'indole da osservatore del mondo.
Che senso avrebbe avuto una fine-vita di quel tipo?
Nemmeno di ribellione a dio, quale dio poi, dopo Auschwitz?

Although the ‘Periodic Table’ is recognized by the Royal Institute of Britain as ‘the best science book ever written,’ it really not a science book. It’s a memoir, it is philosophy, and it is written by gentle soul. The book arrived with high praise from Bellow, Roth, Calvino and Eco.

It came 30 years after Primo Levi’s famous ‘If This is Man’ (or 'Survival in Auschwitz’ in the US) which was written in 1946, almost immediately after his 11 months in Auschwitz. He said he wrote it because he had a moral duty and a psychological need to bear witness to what he experienced. He and other inmates feared no one would believe what was being done. Plus, he said all the very best men died in the camps. (Levi survived only because his education as a chemist was useful in making synthetic rubber.)

His fears were on target and for ten years there was no interest in his story. His writing is vastly different than Wiesel and his background in science lends for a very calm, dispassionate, almost detached reporting of his factual observations, but he was always searching for reasons. For example, he concluded the excesses in violence were probably done to dehumanize the victims so the oppressors would feel less guilt about their murders.

‘Periodic Table’ is more contemplative than 'If this is Man' and devotes only one chapter to Auschwitz. Levi reminisces about his early life in school as a very shy, awkward youth, the joy he found in science, and his respect for working, especially the pleasure of problem-solving. Separated by 30 years from the events of the 1940s, there is more serenity, more reflection and more follow-up conclusions - this is not an angry or brooding book.

In 1987 at age 67, Levi fell four stories from his balcony and died. The coroner ruled it suicide and his biographers generally agree. There was no suicide note; however, he had just finished his last book, ‘The Drowned and the Saved.’ Some say the book was his suicide note as he wrote: ‘. . . this injury cannot be healed.’

Levi told of ‘a dream full of horror (that) has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. . . I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside . . . yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat . . . everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager (the death camp) once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager.

Upon hearing of his death, Elie Wiesel said: ‘Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.’

Levi was actually a secular humanist. He said 'I was not a believer; I am not now a believer. Spirit is something you can’t touch. At that time it seemed to me an official lie insisting upon something you can’t experience with your eyes, your ears, with your fingers.’ He was sent to Auschwitz because of his Jewish heritage.

He was a man of the rational era, someone who took pleasure in the wonders of the world believing everything around him was a mystery to be solved, someone who sought to understand suffering in the world, someone who wrote with a calmness and with integrity.

An extraordinary book.

Si tratta di 21 racconti che comprendono anche "Piombo" e "Mercurio" che corrispondono alle prime prove letterarie di Primo Levi. Il lavoro di chimico gli ha permesso di scrivere questa raccolta in cui, partendo dalla tavola periodica degli elementi, racconta aspetti della sua professione che sono ad esso legati.
Ed ecco che allora emergono racconti come "Argon" che apre la raccolta e che racconta dell'infanzia dell'autore, compreso le sue origini sino alla lingua e i dialetti, arrivando a "Idrogeno" in cui due ragazzi sperimentano l'elettrolisi, oppure "Ferro" che parla di esperimenti nel laboratorio di chimica, ma che sono anche una testimonianza molto importante sulla montagna e ciò che può insegnare.
Tutti i racconti testimoniano l'amore di Levi per la chimica, per gli esperimenti in laboratorio e sono descritti con una sincerità e semplicità che appassiona e commuove al tempo stesso. Storie che toccano nel profondo restituendo la figura di uno scrittore e anima straordinaria.

There are so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean "the New", "the Hidden", "the Inactive", and "the Alien".


Thus begins Primo Levi's book of a score or so mini-memoirs. Each of these is named for one of the elements, thus the name of the book. The elements used are in no particular order – not alphabetical, not by atomic number (the ordering of elements in the periodic table). They range from Argon (the first chapter) to Carbon (the last), from Hydrogen to Uranium, from Nitrogen to Arsenic.

Each of Levi's unnumbered chapters is launched with something about the element used for its name. "Argon" begins with the sentence above, and continues for a rather lengthy paragraph along these lines, ending with "… argon (the Inactive) is present in the air in the considerable proportion of 1 per cent, that is, twenty or thirty times more abundant [by volume] than carbon dioxide, without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet."

But then the next paragraph (in "Argon") begins

The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted them. On the contrary, they were – or had to be – quite active, in order to earn a living and because of a reigning morality that held that "he who does not work does not eat." But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion. It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of the great river of life. Noble, inert, and rare: their history is quite poor when compared to that of other illustrious Jewish communities in Italy and Europe …

Here ends my newer update to original review, continuing below …

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I read this book several years ago, and every so often see something about it here on GR. Perhaps I will write a real review someday, but I would need to re-read it.

(For a real review of Levi's book here on Goodreads, check out https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Levi is well known as a survivor of Auschwitz, a writer of great talent and great humanity. He died (a probable suicide) in 1987.

I thought what I'd do here is give a link to a recent article in the New Yorker by James Wood. It's basically a Levi retrospective, and (without mentioning the new book at all, unless I missed it in a sentence) presumably written to coincide with The Complete Works of Primo Levi, published about a week ago in three slip-cased volumes, with an Introduction by Toni Morrison.

Wood discusses The Periodic Table extensively in the piece, and also writes movingly of Levi's memoirs, available together in If This Is a Man / The Truce.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...



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INSTRUCTIONS (for making this one of the best books you've ever read):

1. Skip the first chapter. Read the rest in its entirety. The chapters aren't connected. Chapter One is didactic and uncharacteristic of the book.

2. Read Chapter One, a discourse on Piedmontese, which is probably only interesting to people of the Piedmont.


YIELD: One of the best books ever.

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 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.

"Периодичната Система" е плод на един щедър и любознателен ум, изненадващ с необятната си човечност. Написана с трогателна самоирония и чувство за хумор, тя е четиво едновременно леко и тежко. Въпреки, че преживяното в Аушвиц не заема централно място в повествованието, разказите свързани пряко или косвено с тази година от живота на автора имат специфично тегло, също като химичните елементи около които се гради съдържанието.
"Периодичната Система" е книга за нощта на Европа, изгубените приятели, любовта към работата и химията като едно всекидневно тайнство. Тя е "микроистория, разказ за едно поприще и неговите поражения, победи и изпитания..."
Горещо я препоръчвам.

La mia valutazione è puramente affettiva. Cosa può rappresentare "Il sistema periodico" di Levi per tutti, ma in particolare per un chimico come me? Veder interpretare gli elementi normalmente così aridi è già un piacere grandissimo, sentire un atomo di Carbonio raccontare la gioia del suo ciclo vitale infinito è godimento puro.

A refreshing, eye-opening read about the real life story of a self-enlightened man whose his intellect in Chemistry was always the essence of his life (or a long period time) and constructed the way he chooses to see the world, amplifying and depicting to all delicacy and real people come alive in the text. Basically, he metaphorizes people, incidents in each "Element" chapter during the time of Fascism, with a wit, humours, melancholy and the sense of hope.
The narrative was unpredictable, heart-breaking and looming in and out through all lives: dead or alive, and how far such a man could learn and live with the consequences, like a result of the experiment after the Element exposition. The book has one of the most memorable endings I've come across.

You know how you read a sentence and copy it down because it's so good? In this book, I'd find a sentence, and go to copy it and realize it relied on the one before it, which relied on the one before that for its complete meaning. So I'd copy down whole paragraphs, whole pages, because Primo writes in integrated, seamless blocks of meaning. Which is enviable.

Other than that, I want to give Primo a big kiss, buy him a beer, and ride bikes with him in Italy.