Primo Levi’s short story novel The Periodic Table is a strange, interesting, maybe convoluted book, with each chapter built around a single chemical element that usually figures into the story, with Levi’s life from childhood through the Holocaust and afterwards as the book’s through-line. It made the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, and in 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever written, for which it beat out The Selfish Gene, Double Helix, and Gödel, Escher, Bach, among other titles. It’s also an arduous read, not for the content around Levi’s time in Auschwitz but for his disconnected writing style and prose that is often a difficult slog. I’m also fairly certain there’s some metaphor in here I missed, perhaps because I found his prose so prolix that I couldn’t read the book on two levels at the same time.
The Periodic Table is an autobiographical collection for Levi, a professional chemist who survived World War II in part due to his chemistry skills (and due to some good fortune, like falling ill before the death march out of Auschwitz that killed many surviving prisoners of the Nazis). Two of the stories (“Lead” and “Mercury”) are straight fiction, but the remainder tell some stories from Levi’s life before and during the war, although a few others read like fables rather than renderings of real life.
Levi survives the war, of course, while many of his friends and colleagues did not. The chapters after the liberation skip over some of his worst experiences in the hands of the Russians, but detail his attempts to reintegrate into the greater science world. “Vanadium” has Levi trying to locate an old nemesis decades after their last meeting. “Silver” is a bit of a science mystery, as Levi has to figure out why certain photographic plates are arriving with flaws from their factory. The final story, “Carbon,” is the most literary of all, a fanciful, beautiful meditation on the arc of a carbon atom over the millennia, going from somewhere in rock and earth to forming part of an actual life and back again, a testament to the impermanence of our existence and the survival of the building blocks of the universe beyond ourselves. But I exited the book with the sense that I didn’t fully appreciate what Levi tried to express; it could be the translation, of course, but I think Levi was such an erudite and precise writer that he often sacrificed clarity to find just the right word or phrase, which meant I spent more time trying to follow the literal plot when there was probably a greater layer of meaning I missed.
Next up: Still reading John Berger’s G..