Il sistema periodico

You know how you read a sentence and copy it down because it's so good? In this book, I'd find a sentence, and go to copy it and realize it relied on the one before it, which relied on the one before that for its complete meaning. So I'd copy down whole paragraphs, whole pages, because Primo writes

The autobiographical story of an Italian-Jewish scientist imprisoned as a chemistry lab worker at Auschwitz. Each chapter is named for an element. Some chapters are essays and some are vignettes of people he knew and their careers in chemistry. They include two short stories about metal prospecting

In a series of interconnected stories (a loose structure that inspired my own book), straddling the border between memoir and autobiographical fiction, Levi tells the story of his life: his centuries-old family origins, his years as a socially awkward young man, the nightmare of Auschwitz and the ye Leggi tutto

Every suicide is like a nail bomb full of vicious questions and the questions don’t care where they land. Why didn’t somebody do something? – there’s one. Surely there must have been signs. Right there is a triple blow delivered to the bereaved partner and immediate family. They’re reeling from the Leggi tutto

Chemistry as a metaphor for life. Blurb writers love phrases like that. They are short, succinct and intriguing. But how hard is it to write something that would deliver on such a promise? I had never read anything quite like ‘The Periodic Table’. It more than delivered – it exceeded my expectations. Leggi tutto

Levi names each chapter by a different chemical element and compares and draws parallels between the elements, or their characteristics, with the features and traits of his experiences. What a marvellous idea. The Periodic Table (1975) is a collection of illustratively written autobiographical essays Leggi tutto

Un po' di chimica e tutta la vita E' una autobiografia per elementi chimici -parziale – perchè di elementi ce ne sono solo una ventina e Primo Levi parla solo di sé, lasciando fuori doverosamente i congiunti: ma elargendo storie sugli antenati, dei quali fa quadretti molto spassosi, un po' irriverent Leggi tutto