The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table, collection of memoirs by Primo Levi, published in Italian as Il sistema periodico in 1975 and regarded as his masterwork. It is a cycle of 21 autobiographical stories, each named after and inspired by a chemical element. To Levi, who was a chemist as well as a writer, each element had an associative value—its properties symbolizing certain thoughts and triggering specific memories. In “Argon” he draws an analogy between the nonreactivity of...