Product Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew.

It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him.

The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53134 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-04
• Released on: 1995-04-04
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.97" h x .61" w x 5.15" l, .56 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.

Review
“I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated…I was deeply impressed.” –Saul Bellow

“The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.”–Italo Calvino

“A work of healing, of tranquil, even buoyant imagination.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant, grave and oddly sunny; certainly a masterpiece.” –Los Angeles Times

“Every chapter is full of surprises, insights, high humor, and language that often rises to poetry.” –The New Yorker

“One of the most important Italian writers.” –Umberto Eco

With a new Introduction by Neal Ascherson


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
In 1919, Primo Levi was born into a Jewish family in Turin where he later trained as a chemist. When the Germans invaded Italy in 1943 he was captured and deported to Auschwitz. After liberation in 1945 his graphic account of the camp, IF THIS IS A MAN, was published in 1947. Many other books followed and Levi emerged as not only one of the most profound commentators on the Holocaust but as a great writer on many twentieth-century themes, especially science. Levi committed suicide in 1987.