The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
A chemist uses elements to survive the 20th century.
you want the Holocaust processed through science and wit rather than grief alone
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Twenty-one chapters, each named for a chemical element, each a story from Levi's life — his Jewish childhood in Turin, the partisan resistance, Auschwitz, the return. The chapter called Cerium is about stealing from the camp laboratory to survive. The chapter called Carbon traces a single atom through geological time into a glass of wine into a nerve cell into a sentence being written. The most original Holocaust dispatch ever written. Levi doesn't ask you to mourn — he asks you to think, which is a more demanding and more respectful request.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Italy • Europe
- Voice
- Written by a Italian author
- Themes
- Witness
