On Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table”

When I teach my course on representations of the holocaust, I don’t lecture (for what it’s worth, it’s an ethical stance for me—but that’s for another comment sometime) and I rarely if ever record our sessions. As can be imagined—since, as I say, these are discussions, not lectures—the sessions are intense and can get very personal. But every once in a while I do talk about the course and about some of the testimonies we study in the course and a recording is made. Such was the case when at the Kelly Writers House I had occasion to make a few comments on a book that is, in my view, not just one of the finest and most important of the twentieth century, but is perhaps one of the few best instances of modernist epic-level serial structure. That book is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. Here is a video of me talking about the book: