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 following 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.

Chapters

1. "Argon" – infancy of the author, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
2. "Hydrogen" – 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 the populating of a remote and desolate island (fiction)
9. "Phosphorus" – an experience from 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 from 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

Adaptions

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.