Il sistema periodico

"With this new book of his, Primo Levi shows us how his calling as writer-witness was not exhausted in the memorable pages of Se questo è un uomo and La Tregua. At first glance, this book seems to be an autobiography of a chemist divided into twenty-one 'moments,' each of which takes a cue from an element - nitrogen, carbon, lead, nickel and so on. Thus these moments are encounters with matter, seen sometimes as mother and sometimes as enemy. In the face of matter, the primitive state of human beings as hunters lives again as they struggle with the world around them both to get to know it and simply to survive. These stories are stories of a craft, 'which is then a particular case, a more strenuous version of the craft of living.' The book has a wealth of defeats, victories, miseries, adventures and encounters, able to appeal equally to our reason and to our imagination. However, the book also tells the story of a generation, here represented by its best members. (We can see this in the splendid portrait of Sandro Delmastro.) The book reconstructs the events of growing up in society during the years of Fascism, the dramatic events of the war, the partisan struggle, the deportation and fitting back into the fatiguing recovery of the post-war period. This is the exemplary story of someone who starts out from the concrete situation of the profession of chemistry and educates himself to understand things and people, to take positions, to test himself with an irony and self-irony that do not rule out firmness. Or, perhaps the book can be read as a moral fable. Thus the ceaseless challenge of inert or ill-willed material can be seen as a Conradian metaphor of existence and of the opacity at its basis, where strange happenings, failures, and successes may emerge. As in all of Primo Levi’s books, here too the calm of his moral judgment comes together with a writing style of classical precision. Here we can find, in a setting that is less inhumane, Levi’s need to testify on behalf of reason and dignity."

"The author of this book – a series of essays each named after a chemical element – is an organic chemist. The book, however, is not about chemistry but about the personal and emotional development of the author. Levi is a Jew and a famous Italian writer, best known for two books entitled Survival in Auschwitz and The Re-awakening in English translation. Both are expressions of human survival by dignity and of Jewish humor without pathos-a combination rare among American Jewish writers. 
The present book is again a terse, low- key, but intensely serious document of life under stress-either the stress of a youth curbed by Fascism or the stress of a chemist struggling with stubbornly defective reagents. The names of chemical elements are used sometimes as metaphors, sometimes more literally to provide occasions for sharp vignettes of the author's early life. As a Jewish student in a fascist society that made Jews openly pariahs; as a climber who found relief in fighting mountain slopes instead of the unapproachable fascist rulers; as a partisan facing the Nazi enemy in those same mountains; and finally as a young chemist learning to deal with the incompetence or worse of the industrial world- Levi sustains an evenness of mood through which shines the consciousness of a hard personal integrity. 
Among the essays the first, 'Argon,' depicts the little-known society of Piedmontese Jews, in which both Levi and this reviewer were raised, a culture that for a long time hardly interacted with the surrounding Christian world (hence be-having like the noble gas argon in air) yet made some outstanding contributions to Italian intellectual life. Anthropologists may be interested in this essay, which reveals a hitherto neglected facet of Italian society. 
The essay called 'Gold' is both personal and symbolic. In prison as a partisan, his life in immediate danger, Levi found relief in consorting with a professional smuggler who had at some time eked a living by collecting a few flakes of gold from a mountain river. The implied message: there is some gold to be found in a human being, or in a river, or in prison if you are alert to it. 
Other essays are closer to natural science. 'Potassium' – set in 1941 – tells of a brief courtship the author had with physics as a possible vocation. The immediate impetus was apparently the willingness of a young physics teacher of philosophical bent to take seriously the intellectual eagerness of a student whom chemistry teachers had, not surprisingly, left unstimulated. This reviewer, who a few years earlier had found among Italian physicists the intellectual stimulus liberating him from a humdrum medical education, can vouch almost to the last comma for the authenticity of the experience described by Levi.
'Arsenic' is a vignette that could easily have been turned into a crime investigation in the hands of a less sensitive author. One of his first clients brings to Levi a pound of sugar which he suspects of having been doctored. Levi analyzes it and finds plenty of arsenic. For the rest of the day he goes on with other work. Next day the client returns, hears the verdict, explains calmly that a competitor – a cobbler like himself – has been making his life hard and now has apparently attempted to poison him. No fuss, no police; the cobbler, a quiet Piedmontese, will return the sugar to his enemy and 'explain two or three things' to him. Levi's philosophy of constructive faith in reasoning reminds me, here and elsewhere in the book, of Diderot's trust in human common sense. 
'Vanadium' is the story of a more recent event. While dealing with a German firm concerning a batch of imported resin (which misbehaved because of a vanadium salt impurity) Levi discovered that his German correspondent was the same man who had been his boss in the Auschwitz camp. The exchanges that ensue illustrate the conflicts of an honest man divided between the forgiveness demanded by personal self-respect and the contempt felt for a Nazi colleague-truly an impurity in the scientific milieu. 
In all 18 essays the writing has an immediacy achieved without sacrifice of sophisticated literary skill. The English translation manages to keep the freshness of the original Italian best seller. Primo Levi succeeds in transforming chemical concepts and processes into metaphorical comments on life. He also achieves the more difficult feat of writing autobiographical stories without either self-effacement or self-congratulation. These essays are in fact, as the author calls them in the essay called 'Nickel,' 'tales of militant chemistry'."