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In reading Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks’s autobiographical novel about his boyhood, family, and young love affair with chemistry, it is impossible not to notice the many similarities with Levi’s book. The cases of Levi and Sacks are of course mutually relevant since they both transfuse and represent their personal and scientific experiences and competencies in their texts. In addition, both authors favour the short story genre because it allows them to narrate different cases in the form of clinical tales or stories of chemical experiments and experiences.¹³

Brought up in a family of profound scientific culture, Sacks recounts how his parents and some of his close relatives transmitted an eagerness for knowledge, stimulating his scientific interests. In his novel’s last chapters, the discovery of biology coincides with his puberty, while the largest part of the book, covering his childhood years, is dedicated to his deep and intense fascination with chemistry.¹⁴ While Levi uses the elements also as metaphorical tools, knowing the chemical elements by experience makes the periodic table primarily a mnemonic catalogue for Sacks, who got the idea for his autobiography through the gift of a small piece of tungsten. In the postscript he writes that in 1997 his friend Roald Hoffmann sent him a parcel containing a poster of the periodic table, a chemical catalogue, and a little bar of a very dense greyish metal. On opening the parcel, the piece of metal fell to the floor with a resonant clonk, which he immediately recognised as the sound of sintered tungsten.

Both Levi’s and Sacks’s novels are indeed educational projects, as they portray basic qualities of chemistry by describing experiments, lab work, and the history of the subject. While Sacks includes short biographies of celebrated chemists, relating the achievements of the likes of Mendeleev, Curie, Dalton, Davy, and Bohr, Levi’s chemical history dwells primarily on the nature of the elements. Levi’s educational project can therefore be said to have a different objective from Sacks’s more encyclopaedic and didactic approach. As mentioned above, to Levi, the trade of chemistry – a science that requires both brain and hands – is in its very essence a tool for identity formation and maturation. Is it then correct, or at least possible, to label these novels Bildungsromane? According to Dilthey’s classic definition, a Bildungsroman portrays a young person who engages in the two tasks of self-integration and integration into society, where the first implies the second. The two autobiographical novels are surely not Bildungsromane in this traditional sense, since they do not portray protagonists that gradually accept the values of society. In fact, in Levi’s case it is quite the opposite, the choice of chemistry having been a conscious act of elimination of the idealist philosophy that neglected science. To the young Levi, chemistry and physics were “the antidote to Fascism…, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers”; furthermore, “chemistry was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy” (PT, p. 42).

These books can also be said, however, to portray the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist, a process that is infused with the apprehension and craftsmanship of chemistry, the art of distinction, patient observation, and experimentation. Since Sacks ends his story when he is about to enter adulthood and leave chemistry in favour of medicine, and then neuropathology, his chemistry remains domestic. Levi’s life journey, by contrast, never leaves chemistry. Reading Levi’s autobiography as a Bildungsroman has recently also been advocated by Enrico Mattioda, who observes that what is at stake in the book’s second half is Levi’s reconstruction of a life for himself. In the second half of the book he approaches the memories and the enemies from the Lager. Levi’s Bildung has no ending, writes Mattioda, or more precisely, it ends with the abandoning of the individual and the particular in favour of the universal, through the story of the atom that represents us all: carbon, the element of life (Mattioda, p. 114-5). The eleventh and central chapter of The Periodic Table, dedicated to cerium, is the autobiography’s nucleus. “Cerium” opens with Levi soberly explaining that he has “lived a different season”, narrated elsewhere. He introduces us to the concentration camp and a person identified by the number 174517, whom he is not sure he can still recognise or reconstruct. It is of course significant that the central and only story from the concentration camp is located precisely in the middle of the novel. “Cerium” is in fact a story about the dignity of man, represented by man as maker, homo faber, even whilst in deepest misery. In the Buna laboratory Levi manages to steal some cylinders of cerium, and he relates how he and Alberto worked night after night to create small pieces of cerium for lighting purposes. They would sell them through the camp’s black market, thus managing to win the bread that kept them alive until the Russians arrived.¹⁵ Since “Cerium” is the only story from Auschwitz, it makes the second half of the novel a history of reconstruction, of new employment, love, and the continuous enigmas, challenges, and struggles in the lab. “Since one can’t live on poetry and stories, I looked feverishly for work”, Levi writes in “Chromium”, the first post-war chapter. He finds employment in a big lakeshore paint factory where he is tasked to solve the mystery of the livering (thickening) of a huge stock of paint. Levi begins the half-chemistry, half-detective work by searching in the lab’s file cards and archives from the war years. He discovers a transcription error, a mistake that had falsified all subsequent analyses on the basis of a fictitious value, and he finally manages to save the paint by introducing the anti-livering agent ammonium chloride. The successful sleuthing-cum-chemistry research is, for him, parallel to “a happy love and a liberating book” (PT, p. 159).

Levi’s book has a very different approach to chemistry from Sacks’ autobiography: it is dedicated primarily to the handicraft, emotion, and imagination of the solitary chemist, whose adversary is “the Button Molder, the hyle: stupid matter, slothfully hostile as human stupidity is hostile” (PT, p. 154).¹⁶ Nevertheless, the two autobiographical novels share some basic structures due to their common scientific grounding. In the following I will suggest three shared fundamental features, namely the history of chemistry, the double nature of chemistry (its “impure” status), and the rhetoric of ekphrasis.