The Periodic Table

Description

In these haunting reflections, Primo Levi, a chemist by training takes the elements of the periodic table as his inspiration. He ranges from young love to political savagery; 'Iron' honours the mountain-climbing resistance hero who put iron in Levi's student soul, while 'Cerium' recalls the improvised cigarette lighters which saved his life in Auschwitz.

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919. The son of an educated middle-class Jewish family, he graduated with a degree in chemistry and found a job as a research chemist in Milan. In December 1943, he was arrested as part of the anti-fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz. After the war, Levi resumed his career as a chemist, retiring only in 1975. His graphic account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, was published in 1947 and he went on to write many other books, including If Not Now, When? and The Periodic Table, emerging not only as one of the most profound and haunting commentators on the Holocaust, but as a great writer on many twentieth-century themes. In 1987, Primo Levi died in a fall that is widely believed to have been suicide.