Publisher's Synopsis
Part of the Blackwell's Five Foot Bookshelf.
70 books, one life-changing collection.
View the Five Foot Bookshelf collection.
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Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says:
For good reason, Levi is the most famous of all Holocaust writers. His memoirs If This is a Man and The Truce are the quintessential narratives of Auschwitz, and his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved showcases his humane but stern thought and his pellucid prose. It is sometimes forgotten that Levi was a chemist by training and each of the twenty-one chapters of this book is named for a chemical element. But, Levi notes with some irony, this is not a chemical treatise. It is, rather, a deceptively gentle survey of many of mid-twentieth-century Europe’s main themes and a celebration of the extraordinary fact of human life. It is a not a Holocaust book in the strict sense; yet, as with everything that Levi wrote, the Lager (Levi always preferred the German term for the camp) is always present. In ‘Vanadium’, Levi tells how, after the war, working again as an industrial chemist, he encounters the German civilian overseer from his Auschwitz laboratory, Dr Müller. This coincidence prompts a reflection on the war, the camp and the postwar world. Tiny atoms open up whole worlds, as the search for some usable vanadium in postwar Italy leads Levi to ponder German industrial power, wartime slave labour, coming to terms with the past, and the meaning of ‘man’. In a striking counterpoint to Arendt’s Eichmann, Levi’s Müller, who perhaps stands for ‘ordinary Germans’, is given a decent disposal in chemist’s terms: ‘Neither infamous nor a hero: aer filtering off the rhetoric and the lies in good or bad faith there remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not so few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind.’
Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories that elegantly interlace the author's experiences in Fascist Italy, and later in Auschwitz, with his passion for scientific knowledge and discovery. This Penguin Modern Classics edition of is translated by Raymond Rosenthal with an essay on Primo Levi by Philip Roth.
A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from young love to political savagery; from the inert gas argon - and 'inert' relatives like the uncle who stayed in bed for twenty-two years - to life-giving carbon. 'Iron' honours the mountain-climbing resistance hero who put iron in Levi's student soul, 'Cerium' recalls the improvised cigarette lighters which saved his life in Auschwitz, while 'Vanadium' describes an eerie post-war correspondence with the man who had been his 'boss' there.
In his essay, Philip Roth reproduces a conversation with Primo Levi, delving into the process of Levi's authorial technique, his sense of identity and distinctiveness and the relationship between science, writing and survival.
