Name: The Periodic Table
Rating: 4.166666666666667 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9780241956816

Primo Levi

Raymond Posenthal

An extraordinary work in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and starting point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as a chemist and his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition.

The Periodic Table

An extraordinary work in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and starting point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as a chemist and his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. "From the Hardcover edition.

Tim Pendry

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.

Raymond Rosenthal

In these haunting reflections, Primo Levi, a chemist by training, takes the elements of the periodic table as his inspiration. He ranges from young love to political savagery; from the inert gas argon - and 'inert' relatives like the uncle who stayed in bed for twenty-two years - to life-giving car bon. 'Iron' honours the mountain-climbing resistance hero who put iron in Levi's student soul, 'Cerium' recalls the improvised cigarette lighters which saved his life in Auschwitz, while 'Vanadium' describes an eerie post-war correspondence with the man who had been his 'boss' there.

Ben Hutchings

Love the style

Some stories were great

Others...

Too much chemistry 

PTSD

Eleonora Casella

Le 3 stelle sono dovute al fatto che lo stile di Primo Levi mi piace molto, è semplice, ma affatto banale, e perché trovo che l'ultimo capitolo, Carbonio, sia un capolavoro che cattura occhi e cuore. 
Però devo ammettere che l'inizio è stato devastante, ho trovato Argon estremamente noioso, poi meglio, fino ad arrivare a Cromo che ho saltato, altrimenti il libro sarebbe ancora nei currently-reading.
Tutto sommato ha carattere, ma la storia di per sé non mi ha entusiasmata.

The Periodic Table

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