Chemistry and literature …

… In his element: looking back on Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Western European history is embedded in the work’s brief time span, from Levi’s student years to the post-war recovery of Italy. Each title of the very different 21 tales is the name of an element at that story’s core, sustaining the architecture of a book that delivers a sharp sense of the compulsion, ambiguities and delights of science.