The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table

"Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust."

Describing himself as having ‘two souls in my body’, Primo Levi was a professional chemist as well as one of the most important chroniclers of the horrors of Auschwitz. Indeed, his profession may well have saved his life by giving him a job in a rubber factory attached to the camp and slightly better conditions. In this haunting series of interlinked autobiographical pieces and stories, the elements from the periodic table become prisms with which to view the world. Having written about Auschwitz with such tender insight in If This is a Man and The Truce, Levi takes us on a journey through pre- and post-war Europe. ‘Iron’ tells of a heroic young climber, a college friend of Levi’s with whom he undertook risky, exhilarating expeditions, and who died fighting in the Italian resistance. ‘Argon’ is a half-comic, half-celebratory memoir of Levi’s Jewish ancestors, speaking their secret mixture of Italian and Hebrew, which allowed them to insult their Christian persecutors safely. ‘Gold’ revisits the heart-stopping time when Levi’s cell of resistance fighters is betrayed and he is arrested, interrogated and faces death. In ‘Vanadium’, a faulty batch of varnish brings Levi into contact with a chemist he realises is none other than the Dr Müller for whom he was forced to work in Auschwitz.

The Royal Institution voted The Periodic Table the ‘Best Science Book Ever Written’. Levi uses the elements of a chemist’s trade as more than a starting point or metaphor. It seemed wrong to him, that the world should not know how ‘we transformers of matter live’, and so his stories examine the ‘strong and bitter flavour’ of a chemist’s life, from the passionate ambition of childhood (‘we would grab Proteus by the throat’), to the ‘joyous battle’ of intellectual challenge that provides meaning and even healing. Both autobiographical and fictional pieces should be explored and savoured slowly, deliberately – in the same way Levi describes the chemist’s habitual, intuitive analysis: ‘probing the unknown material with your fingernail, a penknife, smelling it, feeling it with your lips… weighing it in the palm of your hand.’ Ian Thomson, Levi’s biographer and one of the last to interview him before his death in 1987, contributes a new introduction. Mark Smith’s illustrations ingeniously interpret the book’s elemental themes.