Reviews for The Periodic Table

The average rating for The Periodic Table based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-13 00:00:00 Ann Ilibasic In an interweaving between the elements and stories, Primo Levi tells his life. But he chooses episodes to relate carefully and never discusses his children. At the end he tells us, that his writing was only ""partial and symbolic". The man who wrote so much and so tellingly of Auschwitz in If This Is a Man remains a mystery. The greatest mystery of all, to me, was his death. At 67 he fell over the balustrade of the stairs down from the 3rd floor of the house he'd lived in all his life (except when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz). How do you fall over a stair rail? Was it suicide? Was he the last victim of the concentration camps?

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-20 00:00:00 Ted Donosti You know how you read a sentence and copy it down because it's so good? In this book, I'd find a sentence, and go to copy it and realize it relied on the one before it, which relied on the one before that for its complete meaning. So I'd copy down whole paragraphs, whole pages, because Primo writes in integrated, seamless blocks of meaning. Which is enviable. Other than that, I want to give Primo a big kiss, buy him a beer, and ride bikes with him in Italy.