The Periodic Table (short story collection)

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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.

Video The Periodic Table (short story collection)

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 that follow 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, 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.

Maps The Periodic Table (short story collection)

Chapters

1. "Argon" - The infancy of the author, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
2. "Hydrogen" - when Two children 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 results
6. "Nickel" - In the chemical laboratories of a mine
7. "Lead" - The narrative of a primitive metallurgist (fiction)
8. "Mercury" - A tale of populating a remote and desolate island (fiction)
9. "Phosphorus" - An experience on a job in the chemical industry
10. "Gold" - A story of imprisonment
11. "Cerium" - Survival in the Lager
12. "Chromium" - The recovery of livered varnishes
13. "Sulfur" - An experience on a job in the chemical industry (apparently fiction)
14. "Titanium" - A scene of daily life (apparently fiction)
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" - Finding a German chemist after the war
21. "Carbon" - The history of a carbon atom

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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)

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Adaptations

The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.

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Notes and references

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External links

Source of the article : Wikipedia