Kate Chisholm

Dramatic effect

Plus: an offensive Moral Maze on Radio 4 and how gospel music spread to Oslo and Pakistan

It was hard to believe that Monday morning’s introduction to the Italian writer Primo Levi on Radio 4 lasted for only 15 minutes. It was so rich, multi-layered, filled with meaning. Presented by Janet Suzman, it was intended as a fanfare for the 11-part adaptation of Levi’s most original book, The Periodic Table, in which he explores the chemical elements by equating them to episodes in his own story. Levi, an Italian chemist, was captured by the Nazis as a resistance fighter and a Jew, and at first detained and later sent to Auschwitz. His science training and his knowledge of German saved him from the gas chambers; and a timely bout of scarlet fever ensured he did not die on the death marches from Auschwitz that preceded its liberation. Levi went back to Turin, to his job in a paint factory, and began writing, creating books that have haunted his readers because of his refusal to flinch from the evidence.

As a chemist, Levi was always fascinated by how nature works. He had, we were told, ‘a deep need within to understand what underlies nature’. You can’t lie with nature, you have to be straight with it. And, as he begins writing about his experiences in the war, he comes to realise he can’t excuse but neither can he judge what happened. He does not seek to understand; merely to witness. This is how it is.

Which is why the ‘dramatisation’ of the book on Radio 4 was such a disappointment. As a collection of stories each based on a different chemical element, you might suppose there was no connecting thought running through The Periodic Table. But the effect on reading is a slow accretion of understanding as through each element Levi exposes a different aspect of what it is to be human.

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