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Agamben, Giorgio: Remnants of Auschwitz The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

Affinati, Araldo: “Responsabilità” in Primo Levi. Riga / Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 1997, pp. 426-33.

Antonello, Pierpaolo: “Primo Levi and ‘man as maker’” in Robert S. C. Gordon (ed.): Primo Levi. The Cambridge Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 89-103.

Benchouiha, L.: Primo Levi: Rewriting the Holocaust. London: Troubador Publishing, 2006.

Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette: “Philosophy of Chemistry” in Anastasios Brenner and Jean Gayon (eds.): French Studies in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Springer, 2009, pp. 165-86.

Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Simon, Jonathan: Chemistry: The Impure Science. London: Imperial College Press, 2008.

Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette: “Making up Stories While Making Molecules” in A. Brenner and J. Gayon (eds.): French Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Research in France. Boston: Springer, 2009a.

—: “The Chemists’ Style of Thinking” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32 (2009b), pp. 365-378.

Calvino, Italo: Six Memos for the Next Millennium. London: Penguin, 2009.

Carey, Peter: The Chemistry of Tears. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Cases, Cesare: “L’ordine delle cose e l’oridne delle parole” in Ernesto Ferrero (ed.): Primo Levi: Un’antologia della critica. Torino: Einaudi, 1997, pp. 5-33.

Ginzburg, Carlo: “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive. University of California Press, 2012, pp. 193-214.

Gordon, Robert S. C. (ed.): Primo Levi. The Cambridge Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Herman, David: “Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science” in Narrative Inquiry 8.2 (1998), pp. 279-90.

Hoffmann, Roald and Laszlo, Pierre: “Protean” in Angewandte Chemie International 40.6 (2001), pp. 1033-36.

Hoffmann, Roald: “What Might Philosophy of Science Look Like If Chemists Built It?” in Jeffrey Kovac and Michael Weisberg (eds.): Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 21-38.

Jacob, Francois: On Flies, Mice and Men. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001.

—: “The Birth of the Operon” in Science 13, May 2011, p. 767.

Kovac, Jeffrey and Weisberg, Michael (eds.): Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Laszlo, Pierre: “Enthralled by the Elements. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood” in American Scientist 90.2 (March-April, 2002), p. 1. Levi, Primo: Il sistema periodico. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.

—: The Periodic Table. New York: Schocken Books, 1984.

—: Other People’s Trades. London: Michael Joseph, 1989.

—: The Monkey’s Wrench. London: Penguin, 1986. Montgomery, Scott L.: Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Poli, G. G. Calcagno: Echi di una voce perduta. Incontri, interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi. Milano: Mursia, 1992.

Sacks, Oliver: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. New York: Vintage, 2001.

Sacks, Oliver: “Uncle Tungsten”, www.oliversacks.com (6 Apr. 2013).

Saint-Vincent, Bernadette and Simon, Jonathan: Chemistry: The Impure Science. London/Hackensack: Imperial College Press, 2008

Sleigh, Charlotte: Literature and Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Thomson, Ian: Primo Levi. A Life. New York: Picador, 2004.

Zola, Émile: Thérèse Raquin. London: Penguin, 2005.

1 This is not least thanks to Giorgio Agamben’s pointing to Levi as the perfect example of witness (Agamben, p. 16).

2 In fact, the American publication of The Periodic Table (1984) made his name there among a wide public. In 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain reckoned it to be the best scientific book of all time (the other shortlisted authors were Konrad Lorenz, Tom Stoppard, Steven Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins).

3 Objective and material descriptions and the presence of chemical terms are also characteristic of Levi’s very first publication, a collaborative document co-authored with his friend, fellow survivor, and doctor Leonardo de Benedetti, published in 1946 in the Turin-based medical journal Minerva medica, under the title “Rapporto sull’organizzazione igenico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz – Alta Silesia)”. In his introduction to the English edition of Auschwitz Report (2006), Robert Gordon has described this document as the founding moment, the originary document of If This is a Man.

4 “I set out to study temperament, not character. That sums up the whole book. (…) I freely admit that the soul is entirely absent, which is as I wanted it. The reader has started, I hope, to understand that my aim has been above all scientific” (Zola, p. 4). Charlotte Sleigh has treated the theme of realism in literature and the laboratory in Literature & Science, (2010).

5 The English translation reads “immense patrimony” – I have changed it to the more appropriate “immense inherited wealth”.

6 In recent years the cultural history of elements and chemical substances has been the basis for bestsellers like Pierre Laszlo’s Salt: Grain of Life (2001) and Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales (2011). Hugh Aldersey-Williams shares Levi’s tendency of anthropomorphising elements.

7 Lucie Benchouiha has argued that Levi did play with the atomic numbers in the book, thereby again showing the centrality of the Auschwitz experience: “the chapter dedicated to Levi’s time in Auschwitz, ‘Cerio’, is not just central physically and metaphorically, but also mathematically. The sum of the atomic numbers in the first half of Levi’s work, from ‘Argon’ to ‘Oro’ total three hundred and seventy eight, a total mirrored exactly by the sum of those in the second half, from ‘Cerio’ to ‘Carbonio’” (Benchouiha, p. 67).

8 I use the abbreviation PT to indicate Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.

9 Levi’s biographer, Ian Thomson, writes that Levi discussed the sequel as early as May 1975: “Levi was asked if he planned to write a sequel to The Periodic Table. He said he did, but he had no working title. After discussion the diners came up with The Double Bond. Levi loved the title, which he said remained him of J. D. Watson’s The Double Helix, about the discovery of the DNA” (Thomson, p. 376).

10 Ginzburg then suggests that Levi arrived at the term microhistory through reading Italo Calvino’s translation of Queneau’s Les Fleurs bleues. This might be the case, but it seems more probable that at that time Levi was not aware of the sociological and historical use of the term, and that he simply created it himself. I wish to thank Domenico Scarpa for discussing Levi’s use of this notion with me. As Scarpa points out, since Levi’s library is not accessible, one cannot know for sure whether Levi had read Queneau’s Les fleurs bleues when he wrote “Carbon” in the years 1968-70, even though it was translated into Italian by his friend Italo Calvino.

11 Levi is evoking the title of Cesare Pavese’s posthumously published diary, Il mestiere di vivere (1952), a work that had a huge influence on Levi and his generation.

12 “Our breakthrough was the result of ‘night science’: a stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world that relies on intuition as much as it does on the cold, orderly logic of ‘day science’” (Jacob, p. 767).

13 Sacks masterfully blends science with storytelling and has had huge international success with his books, among which are the collections of case stories The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). While comparing Uncle Tungsten with The Periodic Table, it is of course interesting to note that both authors grew up in Jewish families. Sacks was a child in London during the Second World War; his wartime experience was certainly fundamental to his development, just as Levi’s was. Another world-famous chemist born in a Jewish family and with extreme war experiences is Roald Hoffman, who was a child in Ukraine during the Second World War.

14 Sacks describes how he first got the idea to write his childhood memoirs: “I had intended, towards the end of 1997, to write a book on aging, but then found myself flying in the opposite direction, thinking of youth, and my own partly war-dominated, partly chemistry-dominated youth, in particular, and the enormous scientific family I had grown up in. No book has caused me more pain, or given me more fun, than writing Uncle T. – or, finally, such a sense of coming-to-terms with life, and reconciliation and catharsis”, www.oliversacks.com.

15 It is a significant parallel that the central chapter of If This is a Man is also dedicated to the definition and constitution of human dignity – not through the ideal of homo faber, but represented by the search for knowledge and the legacy of classical literature, exemplified by Dante’s reinterpretation of Ulysses in The Divine Comedy.

16 Levi’s narrations of the solitary chemist – the heroic figure in the laboratory, struggling with the enigmas of matter – have much in common with Sacks’ most successful books, in which the solitary doctor confronts enigmatic patients.

17 The abbreviation UT indicates Oliver Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.

18 Chemistry of Tears is the title of Peter Carey’s 2012 novel.

19 Roald Hoffmann and Pierre Laszlo have interpreted the significance of the mythical figure of Proteus in this quotation. Proteus is a sea divinity with the capacity to foretell the future to those who can seize him, but when caught he transforms into all kinds of creatures. In their article Hoffmann and Laszlo remember the episode from the fourth book of The Odyssey in which Proteus wrestles with Menelao, changes into different forms, but is finally forced to be still and to foretell the future (Hoffmann and Laszlo).

20 “Night lay beyond the walls of the Chemical Institute, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned from Munich duped, Hitler had marched into Prague without firing a shot, … Fascist Italy, the small-time pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of imminent catastrophe condensed like grurnous dew in the houses and streets, in wary conversations and dozing consciences. But the night did not penetrate those thick walls” (PT, p. 37).

21 Sacks writes: “I became terrified of him, for him, of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him … What would happen to Michael, and would something similar happen to me too? It was at this time that I set up my own lab in the house, and closed the doors, against Michael’s madness” (UT, p. 168).

22 Also Hoffmann points out that the mixing up of the microscopic and the macro- scopic perspectives in doing chemistry is one of its characteristics: “the practicing (and excellent) chemists inextricably mix macroscopic and microscopic viewpoints of substances and molecules in the productive work of their science” (Hoffmann, p. 35).