Customer Reviews

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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 In high school he is sent to a new school, and the teachers are not sure how to handle the gifted, but socially withdrawn Mattia.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!

"I'm never alone, I'm alone all the time..."

Gavin Rossdale's aforementioned popular lyric from 90's rock band "Bush" describes this novel best, as his words resonated throughout my skull while devouring this tale of damaged, yet unmistakeably interesting beings.

Most of us have experienced awkward and/or embarrassing situations in our youth; whether it be rejection by a potential suitor for the first time, striking out in an important little league baseball game, or performing actions that one would not normally acquiesce to for the sole purpose of "fitting in". However, some of these situations can be so grim and cavernous that it permanently affects our psyche, or in some instances, our physicality. Paolo Giordano's novel "The Solitude of Prime Numbers" is a fantastic yet melancholy examination of these very scars of our youth projected into adulthood.

Alice is an awkward little girl, forced into scenarios and activities by her upscale father that ultimately leave her physically altered and emotionally detached from her family. With a strong yearning for living a normal life, she goes to extreme lengths to be normal again, eventually giving rise to disorders to which she has little control over. Mattia represents the prodigy with a beautiful mind, but his twin sister Michela has a mental handicap which proves to be his childhood Achilles. The abandonment of his sister in the park to attend a birthday party without the embarrassment of her usual antics causes a deep fear and regret, from which Mattia's genius mind never fully recovers. Eventually, the odd pair cross paths and become frequent acquaintances. While living their lives separately, they continuously are linked to one another and find comfort in the opposite's hidden predicaments to which each never fully grasp.

The characters surrounding Alice and Mattia are both destructive and rehabilitative, and equally as fascinating. From siblings, parents and teenage cliques to friends with alternative lifestyles and potential mates, each of the characters represent a definitive slice of Alice and Mattia's internal evolution or stagnation. Some of them come and go as swift as a breeze, others remain concretely in their lives but never quite understand the damage both have withstood.

Prime numbers, are in essence, a positive integer divisible only by itself and the number "one" (i.e. 11 and 13 are prime numbers). Paolo Giordano's novel relates this mathematical interpretation to human life: Some of us carry the bricks of past experiences that eventually build an invisible wall with enough voids to view and live life, but thick enough that one never quite touches the adjacent. The circumstances unfolding are open to the reader's interpretation, although eluding to several paths. While attempting to lightly tread on the essential broken foundation of humans not living a "normal" life, Giordano conveys that sometimes we love, sometimes we leave, and sometimes we remain, but ultimately the gaps between prime numbers are impossible to be traversed.

This review is geared for people considering this for a book club selection.

A few reasons why I recommend this book for book club:

1) Nobody had heard of it or had already read it when I suggested this novel--not always an easy thing.

2) It is fairly long but was a quick read (I read it in a few hours). So, when we met everyone had read the book and held a strong opinion about it.

3) Though you could read it quickly, the book is very character-driven and thus yielded rich conversation. Most of us agreed that while the characters were not so likeable, they portrayed familiar people and were intriguing for the decisions they made. Other than the In addition to the characters, there was a lot to talk about with regard to literary devices and style--the prime number analogy alone could take up half the discussion. In the end, most of us felt it was 3-4 stars and worth the read.

This book would have been excellent if it were a novella - it wouldn't have suffered at all for losing 150 pages. In fact the excessive detail relating to seemingly significant events (phone calls from Mattias' Dad about a sunset;, a failed driving trip with Alice) not to mention forays into the lives of minor characters (Soledad; Denis) adds precisely nothing to the overall story. I know the point of doing so, but it's a laboured one. We establish very early on that Mattias and Alice are damaged souls; Mattias satiates his guilt through self-harm, whereas Alice seeks power and retribution by dominating the body's desire to eat. Both protaganists feel some kind of pleasure and/or relief in physical pain and in this they have a connection, if somewhat fragile and misunderstood. (Although as a side note, the romantic basis for this friendship, however certainly implied, never felt very convincing to me).

In addition, the details of both Mattias' and Alice's internal dialogues could have been portrayed in far fewer words. Rather than giving the characters the depth and shape they needed to become authentic, they actually had the opposite effect. The characters remained one dimensional, empty, disembodied.

This is a classic case of "more is less". That's the beauty in contrast of the novella, and the short story - the gaps and silences speak much louder than words. Tim Winton is the master of such story-telling, and his similarly tortured and tragic novel "Breath" (not to mention all the stories in "The Turning") springs to mind in that regard.

I gave "Solitude of Prime Numbers" three stars because despite my criticims, it's incredibly readable, if not always enjoyable. Oh, that and the fact that you can't help but be impressed by someone who can turn out a such a highly respected novel independent from their "day job" as a physicist - before they've even hit 30yrs of age! Perhaps for that reason alone it's worth reading.

I found myself checking the author bio quite often -- what? 27? Debut novel? Physicist? Wow, I feel so inadequate. This novel contains so much insight into human life -- the effects of early childhood trauma, peer pressure, societal pressure, trying to forge meaningful connections, shame, guilt, self-mutilation, finding a safe haven, meeting (and not meeting) expectations, searching for peace, etc. And it does so without too much explanation, just by showing. Kind of like the way a mathematician breaks down a long equation into a simple one. My only argument is that it's not just a select few of us -- everyone feels separate at one time or another, and no matter how close you get to other people you can never really know them. The difference is that the "prime numbers" among us are honest enough to recognize this while others choose to deny it, like actors on a stage.

I wondered what it would be like to read this in Italian -- even though the translation was pretty good, there was some repetition (of the same word in one paragraph) which bothered me.

Fantastic novel, highly recommended.

I had very high hopes for this book based both on reviews here as well as critical reviews; perhaps so high that the book could not possibly have met my expectations.

The story begins in 1983 and includes about 25 years in the lives of Alice and Mattia, both of whom suffered major challenges in their childhood growing up in Italy. The book follows the aftermath of how these challenges affected their lives and the choices they made, as well as how their stories intertwined.

Unfortunately, neither of the main characters changed very much over the course of the story. I was hoping that at least one of them would mature or learn from their experiences, but they really didn't seem to grow at all. I don't want to add any specifics for fear of spoiling; however, another problem I had with the book is that nothing much really happens after the opening scenes where the author launched the stories of the two main characters. I also had a great deal of trouble finding the character of Alice at all likeable, and in fact at times I wanted to shake her and say 'grow up and get over it already'.

There were moments in the book where the writing was lovely and worthy of all the praise this book has garnered. In other sections the story seemed to fray at the edges. I really, really wanted to love this book, but I just didn't enjoy it all that much.

I had high hopes for this book, but both my husband and I hated it. The author's writing style is quite beautiful, often with keen observations of the world, or striking turns of phrase. But the story itself didn't do anything for me. It is basically a book about two emotionally dead people, from emotionally dead families, who go through the whole book and barely ever manage to actually connect with each other. Totally unsatisfying. By about halfway through this book, I didn't care whether the two main characters lived or died. That's saying something, since they are supposed to be sympathetic figures each struggling with their own inner pain. Because that inner pain had essentially deadened them both to the world, it was just really hard to care -- it was more or less like reading about two unhappy robots.

I really enjoyed the mathematical premises of this book and initially found their application to the plot and the characters to be quite clever. However, this one high point of the novel became tiresome and was certainly insufficient to carry the whole story. Overall, I found the story to be pretentious, juvenile and mostly uninteresting. The characters left me cold and I did not really care about them. Yes, it was unfortunate that they suffered terrible tragedies as children but it was very difficult to get into the story after those first few chapters. I stopped reading it a couple of times and then came back and finally finished it because I read that it had won awards and had been translated into thirty languages. I am baffled by its success.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers packs a wallop. It seizes you by the throat in the first chapter and it never lets go. I found it to be an amazing portrait of two emotionally detached characters, one who "rejects the world" and the other who "is rejected by it."

The novel gets its title from mathematics; Paolo Giordano is a professional physicist. He writes, "Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers..."

Alice Della Rocca is forced by her callous father to take ski lessons when she is quite young; a ski accident leaves her with disfiguring scars, a noticeable limp, and an eventual fall into anorexia. Her counterpart, Mattia Balossino, briefly abandoned his mentally disabled twin sister to attend a party unencumbered by her "weirdness"; she disappears, leaving him with a great deal of trauma and a need to harm himself with blade and flame.

These two damaged individuals are unable to surmount the emotional wall they have raised up, but they do recognize a kindred spirit in the other. As they grow older, they attract warm-hearted and "normal" people to their orbit, but they can never truly reciprocate the emotions they evoke.

There are images that Giordano creates that quite literally cause the reader to gasp because of their power. Alice's attempt to flush a calorific meat-stuffed tomato down the toilet during a romantic first date or the cruelty exhibited to her by the "popular" girls... Mattia's attempt to fit in with his mathematical peers...all of this is eloquently written and beautifully detailed.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this book is a translation from the Italian by the amazing Shaun Whiteside - one of the most fluent and flawless translations I've ever read. I've learned that a translator can make or break a book and I applaud him. Read this book - it's unlikely the images will fade from your mind anytime soon.

Clever title. Beautiful symmetric analogies unraveling in the first few pages describing the nature of the two main characters.

Smart calculations around the plot. But all in all a book about how an emotional trauma can turn to a physical and a physical one can cripple someone emotionally. But unfortunately by lacking ANY spontaneous element from the core theme of the book.

I am sorry to say that but the characters were portrayed poorly. They never grow within the book or somehow evolve.

Their sorrow lays still in an unnatural stability for ever and ever. They remain eternally bullied teens buried in guilt reaping themselves off in any chance appeared - and they are many chances within this book.

As nothing changes through the pages and our dear Matthias and Alishe continue living inside their egocentric bubble of an eternal emotional childhood mentally masturbating in thoughts without actions.

I hopelessly turned from page to page looking for a sparkle of evolution that never came.

I was not looking for a Hollywood ending but some twists and turns within the characters could make the pages less heavier to turn...

In a few words?

After 40 pages this otherwise beautifully written book is getting tremendously boring... Starting with great potential but eventually drowned by its own stiffness.

ps: Heavily influenced by "The lovers of arctic circle" ....