The Periodic Table (book)

The Periodic Table

First edition
Author	Primo Levi
Original title	Il sistema periodico
Translator	Raymond Rosenthal
Cover artist	M. C. Escher
Country	Italy
Language	Italian
Publisher	Einaudi (Italian) Schocken Books (English)
Publication date	1975
Published in English	1984
Media type	Print (Hardcover) and (Paperback)
Pages	233
ISBN	0-8052-3929-4
OCLC	16468959

The elements that are titles of the stories.

The Periodic Table (Italian: Il Sistema Periodico) is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, published in 1975, named after the periodic table in chemistry. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever.^[1]

Content

The stories are autobiographical episodes of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime and afterwards. They include various themes following a chronological sequence: his ancestry, his study of chemistry and practising the profession in wartime Italy, a pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time,^[2] and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan, his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps, and postwar life as an industrial chemist. Every story, 21 in total, has the name of a chemical element and is connected to it in some way.

Chapters

1. "Argon" – infancy of the author, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
2. "Hydrogen" – two kids experiment with electrolysis
3. "Zinc" – laboratory experiments in a university
4. "Iron" – the adolescence of the author, between the racial laws and the Alps
5. "Potassium" – an experience in the laboratory with unexpected effects
6. "Nickel" – in the chemical laboratories of a mine
7. "Lead" – the narrative of a primitive metallurgist (fiction)^[3]
8. "Mercury" – a tale of the populating of a remote and desolate island (fiction)^[4]
9. "Phosphorus" – an experience from a job in the chemical industry
10. "Gold" – a story of imprisonment
11. "Cerium" – in order to survive in the Lager
12. "Chromium" – a recovery of livered varnishes
13. "Sulfur" – an experience from a job in the chemical industry
14. "Titanium" – a scene of daily life
15. "Arsenic" – consultation about a sugar sample
16. "Nitrogen" – trying to manufacture cosmetics by scratching the floor of a hen-house
17. "Tin" – a domestic chemical laboratory
18. "Uranium" – consultation about a piece of metal
19. "Silver" – the story of some unsuitable photographic plates
20. "Vanadium" – to find a German chemist after the war
21. "Carbon" – the history of a carbon atom

Bibliography

• First American edition, New York, Schocken Books, 1984
  • ISBN 0-8052-3929-4 (hardcover)
  • ISBN 0-8052-0811-9 (trade paperback)
• Reissues
  • Random House hardcover edition, September 1996 ISBN 0-679-44722-9 (ISBN 978-0-679-44722-1)
  • Knopf Publishing Group paperback edition, April 1995 ISBN 0-8052-1041-5 (ISBN 9780805210415)

Notes and references

1. The Guardian: Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title.
2. In the chapter, Nickel, "...on some other of those long nights were born two stories of islands and freedom, the first I felt inclined to write after...liceo..." (1984 pb edition, p. 73), and "Nor have the two mineral tales which I wrote then disappeared... The reader will find them here in the succeeding pages, inserted, like a prisoner's dream of escape, between these tales of militant chemistry." (ibid., p. 78)
3. "One story fantasize[s] about a remote precursor of mine, a hunter of lead instead of nickel..." ibid., p. 73
4. "...the other [story], ambiguous and mercurial, I had taken from a reference to the island of Tristan da Cunha that I happened to see during that period." ibid., p. 73