Friday, 4 September 2015

Il Sistema Periodico – Primo Levi



One of the books I’ve read to distract myself as I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on Italian Fascism while still feeling like I was doing some academic work (I might have even thrown a couple of cheeky references to this collection of short stories for good measure).

Having only read works by Levi that had been marked by the Holocaust, it was rather refreshing to read stories about Levi’s life before WWII, finding even a trace of humour every now and then – something so sadly absent in most of his books.

I am not a fan of short stories, I never have enough time to be drawn into them, and I am by no means a scientist (like Levi was, and he titled every short story in this collection with the name of an element on the periodic table) so I think I missed a number of the book’s subtleties. Still, I liked it nonetheless.


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