"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist." - Vladimir NabokovPrimo Levi, a chemist by trade, survivor and documenter of Auschwitz, was one of the 20th century’s great humanists. That Levi was able to keep his positive outlook on human beings and human nature after being tortured and thoroughly dehumanized by two fascist regimes, that he could keep his dry, ironic sense of humour and keep up his child-like wonder for a world which had often offered him only pain and degradation, is in a miracle-yet for Levi life and the world itself was an endless source of miracles, the never-ending wonders of chemistry and human nature are the elements which make up the essence of ‘The Periodic Table’ Levi starts with a brief if humorous account of various relatives and half-relatives and half-remembered relatives, a kind of eulogy to the lost world of Piedmontese Jewry, to its dialects and the noble inertia of the cranks and eccentrics who populated it. Yet the humorous tone is hiding something irrevocably tragic-that this culture was not lost via the vestiges of time but via the evil of the gas chamber, that these people who were deemed subhuman, sly and usurious, responsible for the fall of civilizations and depravation of a race, were just human beings, with the same quirks, foibles and eccentricities of any other people. As Levi states; “According to the above-mentioned regime, a Jew is stingy and cunning, but I was not particularly stingy or cunning, nor had my father been.” Levi found his answer to the dehumanization of both himself and all the other groups who fascists deemed sub-human via two things: chemistry (or science) and art. For many the two are not linked, yet for Levi the two are one and the same thing, if chemistry allows us to explore the elements and atoms which make up the world around us, then literature allows us to express their beauty-one cannot exist without the other; “It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed, the old wood of the benches, the sun’s sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies in the world be able to construct a little fly? No, not even understand it…” For Levi the didactic nature of Nazism was the death of both science and art, once we open our eyes to the intransigence of Nazism we close our eyes to the beauty of the world, to the sanctity of life or to the beauty of an insignificant fly. Levi was distrustful of the dictatorial nature of Nazi scientists, of its unquestionable logic and unquenchable ignorance. For Levi the ideal scientist would be certain of nothing and uncertain of everything, he would constantly seek to test his views and hypotheses, for Levi science was merely his pathway to explore the wondrous nature of the universe; “My legs were shaking a bit, I experienced retrospective fear and at the same time a kind of foolish pride, at having confirmed a hypothesis and unleashed a force of nature. It was indeed hydrogen, therefore the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensation the universes are formed in eternal silence.” Levi is able to counteract Nazi theories of racial purity via a scientific experiment via the importance of impurities in creating balance, that there was no such thing as purity without impurity and quite often is was impossible to differentiate between the two and know which was which; “the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words to life. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: fascism does not want them, forbids then, and that’s why you’re not a fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not.” For Levi art was another way of overcoming the degradation of fascism, it was an avenue for him to regain his humanity via his life, his memories and the people he loved and lost, whose individuality Levi is able to bring out and celebrate by comparing them to the various chemicals which make up ‘The Periodic Table’. “The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty about being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friend, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told the story…by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor a debased saint: one of those who look to the future rather than the past.” Levi was fascinated by the rise of fascism, yet he was not one to propose simple solutions or to paint all Germans, or even all fascists with the same brush, however contemptuous he was of them. Take, for example, the case of Dr Muller, who rescued Levi from the gas chamber by giving him a job in a laboratory, yet turned a blind eye to the horrors of the holocaust, to the gas chambers and genocide, thinking them an anomaly, an unfortunate by-product of a well-meaning regime. This kind of mass myopia which took over the minds of so many German’s following the holocaust, this inability to admit that many good and honest people had taken part in or ignored the systematic dehumanization and destruction of an entire race, that the German people were unable to admit to their guilt was almost a bad a crime as fascism itself, because this collective exoneration would do nothing to prevent further atrocities from taking place. Fascism would never regard itself with ironic self-abasement like Levi, never know the stoic individuality of the heroic Sandro, never possess the vivacity of Guilia or the humility and wisdom of the old cobbler who had no wish to revenge himself on the upstart cobbler who tried to poison him. No fascist would ever know the beauty of phosphorous, the wonders of chemistry or the world around us.
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.
What do You think about The Periodic Table (1995)?
Chimica e poesia“[...] la nobiltà dell'uomo, acquisita in cento secoli di prove ed errori, era consistita nel farsi signore della materia ...mi ero iscritto a Chimica perché a questa nobiltà mi volevo mantenere fedele... vincere la materia è comprenderla, e comprendere la materia è necessario per comprendere noi stessi, e che quindi il Sistema Periodico di Mendeleev, che proprio in quelle settimane imparavamo laboriosamente a dipanare, era una poesia, più alta e più solenne di tutte le poesie digerite in liceo....” Ventuno racconti, ciascuno dei quali ha come titolo il nome di un elemento del Sistema periodico collegato, direttamente o per analogia, a un particolare avvenimento della vita dello scrittore, dalla giovinezza alla maturità. Materia e vita così si fondono indissolubilmente in queste storie, osservate dalla curiosità dello scienziato e interiorizzate dalla cultura e dalla sensibilità dell’uomo. La scrittura di Primo Levi è lineare e logica, priva di ricercatezze stilistiche e apparentemente senza peso, ma in realtà è profondamente evocativa e ricca di intense suggestioni, capace di divertire, stupire, commuovere con il lampo della poesia in una riflessione o una rivelazione inattesa. Splendido.
—Ginny_1807
I feel guilty for not liking this more. I was enthralled by the Drowned and the Saved but these stories let me down. The use of the elements as a framing device for a collection of stories, memories and more for a chemist is excellent. The early elements take the form of a memoir and are good. However, the stories, such as the aptly titled lead, don't seem to add anything and for me don't work either as fables or indeed stories. Some of the later entries, recounting his post war chemical chemical career, didn't resonate. The entire book though is lifted by the superb vanadium. He writes of his encountering in the course of business a German chemist who he worked for in the death camps. The correspondence between them and his analysis of the German doctor's "guilt' is quite superb. If the entire book was on this level, it could have been a masterpiece.
—T P Kennedy
Primo Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist who survived Hitler's Holocaust. This is my second time to read a book by him. I read his first novel Survival in Auschwitz (3 stars) last year and I feel in love with it so that I had to make sure that I have this book and If Not Now, When?. These seem to be his trilogy of memoirs directly recalling his experiences in the concentration camps.This book is composed of short stories and annecdotes from before, during and after his life in Auschwitz. Each of those pieces of beautiful writing is somehow related to the an element or group of elements in the Periodic Table (that explains the title of the book). However, I think The London's Royal Institution on 19 October 2006 got it wrong when they voted this book onto the shortlist for the best science book ever written. The reason is, despite direct references to chemisty and the elements, this is a memoir and not a science book.There are also two seemingly Italian folklores and standalone short stories "Lead" and "Mercury" that are said to have been published separately. Other than those and the offplaced first story "Argon" everything else are about the Holocaust. My favorite part is when he was hired as a chemist and this explained well why he was able to survive his life in the concentration camps: his being a chemist made him stay inside the laboratory even if he was not doing anything except on how to steal food in every opportunity. I found this humorous now but of course, there was definitely not an iota of fun while he was doing all those stealings as one lapse could mean his life.I found Survival in Auschwitz (It This is a Man) too heavy but I of course liked it. The Periodic Table on the other hand is a sweet mixture of sadness, poignancy, fantasy, humour and a lot of chemistry. Even if one of my favorite subjects in high school and college was chemistry, there were just too many references for my taste as my schooling days were a least three decades ago and all I could recall about chemistry are some of the elements symbol, some salts, some valences, the carbon bond, parts of the Krebs cycle. That's it. But this book has a lot more.If you are a reader who has background in Chemistry and you dig the Holocaust stories, in movies and in prints, this book is for you.
—K.D. Absolutely
