The Solitude of Prime Numbers

This is one of those impossible to put down novels, the kind that makes you forget the rest of the world exists. I took it on a retreat weekend and finished it in one sitting. It was just that good. To me, Mattia struck me as autistic, or affected by the disorder to some degree. His brilliance, as well as his difficulty forming relationships and being close to people, seemed consistent with autism. Did Giordano intend this? I wonder. And Alice... I adored her, empathizing her from the beginning. She epitomizes the child from whom extraordinary things are expected, a child driven by her father's idea of what she should be, not caring how she felt. No wonder she suffered from an eating disorder as a result of all the anxiety suffered from her childhood. Characterization is one of the strong suits in this novel, but the plot is no less compelling. It's an all-around wonderful read, spare thought it is. I'll be on the lookout for more books by Giordano, which I hope are in progress. Not often is a debut this excellent. Hard to imagine how he'll follow it up.

I haven't even finished this book but from page one I knew I had something different and precious in my hands. A very beautiful, insightful book that doesn't shy away from the tragedy of life.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Personally, it was the best read I've picked up since The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is a bit of a sad story, but anyone who's ever felt awkward or made uncomfortable mistakes in relationships will identify in some way with pieces of the characters and their shattered lives. I found myself trying to root for the characters, but this isn't a fairy tale-type story. I appreciate that sense of reality. The language and the descriptions are outstanding in my opinion as well. I do recommend this book.

Physicist Paolo Giordano's debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, won Italy's premier literary award, the Premio Strega, in 2008. Now available in the U.S. in an English translation, The Solitude of Prime Numbers explores the poignant relationship that develops between two misfits, Alice and Mattia. Alice, an anorexic with a limp left over from a childhood skiing accident, resists forming trusting relationships, and Mattia, carrying a lifetime of guilt over the early loss of his twin sister, is forever surrounded by a "contagious air of tragedy." Beginning with their teenaged years, Alice's and Mattia's lives progress in mostly parallel narratives with only occasional, and often awkward, intersections. Over time, Alice and Mattia build "a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe ...." Like for prime numbers, which are always sandwiched between ordinary numbers, "solitude is the true destiny" for Alice and Mattia. Giordano's elegant and understated prose perfectly matches the elegiac tone of Alice's and Mattia's story. Shot through with poetic passages that resist shading into extravagance, Giordano's sentences are a joy to read even if the novel's episodic presentation, along with the accompanying substantial gaps in time, is sometimes unsatisfying. The novel's graceful conclusion resists smoothing over the wonderful and confusing complexity of human relationships. Overall, The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a haunting and rewarding read.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a quiet but poignant coming of age story about two lonely misfits: Alice Della Rocca and Mattia Balossino. The story begins in 1983 and ends in 2007. Alice is pushed by her overbearing father at a young age to become a world-class skier, but a serious skiing accident,in the Italian alps, leaves her scarred and with a permanent limp. She desperately wants to fit in, but she is taunted by other classmates, engages in self loathing behavior, and, as a result, detests her father for the life she seems faced with. Mattia is a twin, while he is brilliant, his twin sister Michela is damaged: "his brain seemed to be a perfect machine, in the same mysterious way that his sisters was so defective". Despite this the twins are placed in the same class at school, and Mattia finds himself constantly trying to shelter his sister from the taunting and the laughter of other students. He is forced by his parents to take his sister everywhere. When an incident occurs for which Mattia feels responsible, his life becomes full of guilt, and self loathing behavior as well. In high school he is sent to a new school, and the teachers are not sure how to handle the gifted, but socially withdrawn Mattia. Alice tries to befriend Mattia, and is attracted to him. When she learns that he is a genius, she asks him if he likes to study. His reply is: "It's the only thing I know how to do." (He wanted to tell her that he liked to study because you can do it alone, because all the things you study are already dead, cold and chewed over). Needless to say, for Alice and Mattia the high school years had further scarred these two individuals who felt rejected by the world. "They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of the school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation." Taking separate paths after high school, Mattia, a brilliant mathematician, goes off to the university. The two reconnect off and on. Mattia summed it all up by saying he and Alice were "twin primes" alone and lost, "close but not close enough to really touch each other ---lonely individuals forever linked but separated." MY THOUGHTS -- I loved this book. Not only is a debut novel, written by a physicist, it was first written in Italian, and beautifully translated to English. The story is told in short, alternating chapters, and it drew me in from the very first page. The characters are damaged and sympathetic. It is a beautiful story which shows just how a traumatic childhood can scar us for life. It's a story of missed opportunities, and one that I will not easily forget. The ending surprised me, and I look forward to more books by this talented author. READ THIS BOOK!