The Solitude of Prime Numbers

This wonderful book follows the lives of two uniquely different characters, Mattia and Alice, she’s anorexic, he’s a cutter. Tragic accidents, resulting from foolish decisions, Mattia’s own when he leaves his twin alone in a park and Alice’s own when she decides to ski down a mountain alone, in the fog, after being forced by her domineering father to participate in the sport, shape their lives. Both characters continued to help create their own unhappiness and isolation, as they matured, further paving the dysfunctional path of their futures. Neither one fit comfortably into the world, in the space they occupied, and their own impetuous decisions, as they grew older, were just as foolish as those that originally caused their show more lives to veer into the unusual, rather than the ordinary.
Alice and Mattia are indeed prime numbers, divisible only by one, because they can’t abide close relationships with others. As they matured, they both continued to help shape their own unhappiness and life of solitude, a life they seemed, eventually, to grow to prefer. Their own idiosyncratic behavior discouraged healthy interactions as much as the way others treated them created that unhealthy behavior, that very behavior which turned them away from personal contact.
The book explored the consequences of decisions and the interaction of the characters with others, as they developed. They were needy and they met needy people. They were lonely and lonely people gravitated toward them. Dysfunction followed them, and often it was the key to their survival, as others, in spite of their shortcomings and their oddness, were drawn to them, precisely because of their deficiencies.
The book is uncomfortable to read because it is a sad commentary on the lives of the characters that never seemed to move on and grow. The book examines characters that are so called, “normal” characters who preyed on those that were not, who bullied them mercilessly, and yet, those characters managed to have more successful lives than those they bullied, and left to wither. All of the characters seemed flawed in some way, all seemed to have trouble communicating with each other, but the two main characters were uniquely flawed.
It was another audio book for me and I am becoming quite fond of this format. If the reader is good, the experience is exhilarating because I think it helps you become a part of the narrative with the narrator, feeling the excitement, fear, tension of the voice and suffering the whole range of emotions of the characters, as they do. Although I found it to be a sad little book, I also found it to be quite credible and recognized some of the characters in other people I have known through my lifetime. Reactions were plausible. I never had to suspend disbelief. It examined the ordinary and extraordinary reactions our experiences and environment sometimes unwittingly, precipitate. show less

Did you ever stand on the edge of the crowd, unbelonging and unable to turn away? If you did, you’ll see something of yourself hidden in Alice or Mattia, both wounded by their childhood attempts to escape. Calming the mind with numbers, soothing the body with pain, starving their thoughts and their feelings, they suddenly find themselves thrown together, with each’s dark unbalance harmonizing the other, and childhood ends.

Of course, childhood’s end is messy, inconvenient, and fraught with conflicting purpose. But Paulo Giordano tells the tale of his misfits with beautifully well-fitted words, complex turns of phrase that fly from the page and soar, and fragile emotions aching to be seen instead of ignored.

As plans fail and lives show more flail, growing apart replaces growing together for these two stranded characters. A chance encounter might restore what’s lost, but there’s a core of genuine, unpredictable feeling underneath the mathematical precisions of separation. The novel slowly opens to reveal a view wider than mountainscapes, deeper than rivers, and more honest than fiction is usually allowed to be. If you want glib and easy, this isn’t the book for you. If you want gritty, broken, and quietly healed, it is.

Disclosure: A friend loaned me her copy, correctly guessing I would really enjoy it. show less

Prime numbers are those that can be divided only by themselves and the number one. Mattia, one of the protagonists, has an extreme talent for mathematics and becomes a university lecturer, but the novel does not focus on mathematics, per se; rather, the concept of primes represents the solitude and loneliness of the two protagonists: Mattia and Alice, both of them scarred by childhood experiences, both of them loners, both of them outsiders. There are certain prime numbers that are separated by only one other number, e.g. 7 and 9, or 29 and 31…..Mattia and Alice are like these numbers and though they do find each other, neither has any experience in, or capacity for, opening honestly to another person, so miscommunication thwarts the show more journey of their lives. Alice is a loner because she limps from a childhood accident and is never part of the “in” crowd; Mattia’s loneliness stems from his responsibility for the disappearance and death of his sister. Giordano is good on the sensitivities of emotions and relations, for children and adults. This is his description of Mattia’s relationship with his parents after he has moved to England, from Italy, to pursue a scholarship and teaching:

“They had already run out of things to say, but they lingered for a few seconds, the receivers pressed to their ears. They both breathed in a little of the affection that still survived between them, diluted along hundreds of miles of coaxial cable and nourished by something whose name they didn’t know and which perhaps, if they thought too carefully about it, no longer existed.”

This is a novel about the weight of consequences for actions taken, actions that scar and change lives for a number of people. It is about loneliness and at the same time a deeply human trait to reach out for emotional connections and love that can sometimes emerge from the most unlikely of circumstances. But love is not a panacea, it is not immutable: “…the love of those we don’t love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.” The novel is also about the weight of change and time and distance, and the strength that one can find within oneself, to come to terms with oneself. I feared, towards the end of the novel, that Giordano was going to veer towards the saccharine, but he did not and it made the ending more satisfying, more real.

An impressive first novel. show less

Mi ha sorpresa, commossa e divertita. Mi ha preso alla testa e al cuore. L'ho letto tutto in meno di tre ore, d'altra parte - dimenticandomi dei miei vicini di scompartimento che strepitavano al cellulare.
Stupendo, semplicemente stupendo il passaggio da cui, presumo, è nata l'idea del titolo.
La scrittura è abbastanza asciutta ma, allo stesso tempo, emotivamente ricca - anche se talvolta si esagera un po' con il numero di metafore nello stesso paragrafo.
Unico difetto - per me del tutto "perdonabile" essendo l'autore tutto sommato piuttosto giovane - lo stacco, piuttosto netto sia nella trama sia nella capacità di coinvolgimento del lettore, tra i primi tre quarti del libro, in cui i personaggi hanno un'età minore o circa uguale a show more quella dell'autore, e l'ultimo quarto, in cui sono trascorsi gli anni e, con essi, la freschezza e la lievità dell'intreccio. Forse per evitare un finale scontato, se ne sceglie un altro non del tutto convincente. Peccato veniale, tuttavia. show less

Hay libros que estimulan la imaginación, libros que se basan en una trama apasionante, llena de viajes a lugares exóticos o de historias fabulosas, que te permiten pasarlo bien durante un rato, que te ayudan a evadirte del mundo mientras estás imbuido en ellos. Y después están los libros de personajes como es el caso de Paolo Giordano y 'La soledad de los números primos'. Como bien reza la contraportada, "Todo el mundo reconocerá algo de sí mismo en el libro de Giordano, pues el verdadero protagonista de esta maravillosa historia es la soledad." Todo el libro rezuma soledad y nostalgia en cada una de sus páginas. A pesar de la juventud de Giordano y de ser su primera novela, ha escrito una obra de una gran madurez. La única show more pega que le pondría sería que a veces mezcla las voces que llevan la historia, pero eso es lo de menos. Es una gran novela. ¿Por qué? Por la sencilla razón de que me interesa lo que me está contando, y de que los personajes me son muy cercanos y me identifico con algunas de las situaciones y pensamientos. Siempre me acompañarán. show less

Alice is an anorexic rich girl. Mattia is a mathematical genius who is carrying around a guilty secret. Neither has been successful at forming bonds with other human beings, and both of them have scars, both literal and figurative, that the rest of the world actively ignores. But maybe they could truly connect with each other, if they'd ever let themselves.

OK, that sort of makes it sound like it might be a cheesy romance. It's really, really not. In fact, I found it rather painful to read, not so much because it contains bullying and self-harm and other disturbing and depressing subjects, but because I so badly wanted to reach through the pages and smack both of them until they made different choices, said what they were thinking, and show more started treating themselves better. But it was mostly the good kind of pain, and the "Aargh, I care about these characters and they keep making me suffer with them!" kind of wanting to smack them, not the, "Aargh, the author has made these characters too annoying and stupid!" kind.

The writing is very good, even in translation: simple and understated and rather compelling. There is, perhaps, something that feels slightly artificial in how pure these characters are in their isolation and their damage, if that makes sense. But I think there's also something that feels true in it, anyway, so that ultimately, it works. I'm not entirely sure about the ending, which had just enough ambiguity to leave me mildly troubled, but in principle, at least, I think it's probably better than any of the possible endings I was imagining. show less

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 show more 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.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. show less