The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano is a quiet book about two damaged people, Alice and Mattia. How they became damaged is the baggage they carry with them that affects everything they do.
Alice lived in the Italian Alps as a child. Her father decided she was going to be a great skier and forced her, everyday, to take lessons from the time she was small. Alice does not like skiing, is not particularly good at it and doesn’t want to be. In fact she is so anxious and upset by the whole thing that she regularly wets herself while out on the slopes. One day her father sends her out to her lesson in the fog and a temperature of ten below. Alice immediately has to urinate and soon she feels her bowels wanting to let go too. But she can’t do it in front of her instructor or fellow students.
After one long chair lift up the mountain with the prospect of another lift further up, Alice can no longer bear it. She skis off a little way into the fog. Instructor and classmates have no idea where she has gone off to and assume she is already on the next lift so leave without her. In the quiet fog Alice starts to struggle to get her ski pants down but fails to do so before her bowels let go. She can’t go back to class like that so she decides to ski down the mountain and go home. The fog is so thick, however, she can’t see where she is going. She strays off course onto a closed part of the slope, goes over a precipice and finds herself at the bottom of it with a broken leg. She is unable to get up and no one is around to hear her call out and she fully expects she will freeze to death.
Mattia and Michela are twins. But where Mattia borders on genius, Michela is severely developmentally disabled. Michela is put in the same class at school as Mattia. Mattia is forced by both his parents and his teachers to always look out for Michela because none of them know what to do with her. Mattia never gets to do anything alone and never has the chance to make friends because of Michela. And then a classmate invites Michela and Mattia to his birthday party.
Mattia’s mother is overjoyed, relieved that maybe Mattia really does have friends against all evidence to the contrary. Mattia does not want to go to the party but his mother insists. Mattia dares to ask if he can go without Michela and his mother is horrified. Micheal must go too.
The afternoon of the party Mattia and Michela set off to walk the few blocks to the classmate’s house. When they pass by the park by the river, Mattia gets an idea. He takes Michela to the table where the family has gone for picnics before and tells her to stay there and not move. He’s not even sure that she understands, but he convinces himself that she does and he will only be gone for half an hour and everything will be ok. Mattia is gone for several hours, forgetting his sister in his first chance to have fun. When he remembers her it is full dark. He rushes out of the party and to the park. Michela is not there. He searches for her to no avail.
He ends up standing at the riverbank, knowing she has fallen in. In his despair, he sits down on the bank where his hand finds a piece of broken glass. He then proceeds to stab his hands with the shard.
Alice and Mattia meet in high school. Both are outcasts. Alice is considered lame, the leg she broke in the accident doesn’t work right and she has a funny, swinging gate. She has also become anorexic. Mattia studies all the time and is very good at math. He is painfully shy and takes out his anger and aggression on himself by cutting. The two are quite the pair and form a friendship in which neither questions the other and so they feel safe because they do not need to make up lies or evasive answers.
Alice and Mattia are like the prime numbers that so fascinate Mattia:
Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They stand in their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed in between two others, like all other numbers, but a step further on than the rest. They are suspicious and solitary, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they’d been trapped like pearls strung on a necklace. At other times he suspected that they too would rather have been like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they weren’t capable of it.
It is his work with prime numbers at university that leads to a job offer from an English University. He leaves Alice in Italy where she becomes a photographer, taking pictures at weddings and other events. But neither Mattia and Alice can forget about the other or rescue themselves from their respective mental illnesses.
The end of the book could have been tragic or it could have been a forced happily ever after. It is neither. The end is fitting and offers a twinkle of possible redemption. I was relieved to finish the book, not because it was bad, it is a very good book, but because Mattia and Alice are two difficult characters the reader can neither love nor hate. And just as they keep others from them, they don’t let the reader get close to them either. They made me tired but I couldn’t give up on them.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a bestseller in Italy, I hope it does well in English translation. The book is Giordano’s first. I hope he doesn’t become too busy in his work as a physicist to write more. It will definitely be interesting to see how he develops as a writer.
Man, I love that title! This might be something I have to check out . Thanks for the review 🙂
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Alice and Mattia sound both difficult and intriguing. I love the title myself. I’ll have to look for the book.
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Wow. Their lives sound like my worst nightmares! 🙂
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This sounds like a difficult but engaging book. I like characters that are hard to like, especially if the writer manages to make me care about them. I’ll be looking for this one, thanks.
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I just love this review, and I am going to pick this book up soon. And I really think the title is great.
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Not sure if this sounds like something I’d like. Will probably pass. But I wanted to comment on your earlier post regarding your new Kindle downloads. Have you heard of online-literature.com? You can read a lot of classics on line for free there (of course, Kindle owners would not be interested). And, reading on-line isn’t much fun, I’ll grant you. But in a pinch…
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Great review, Stefanie. This book sounds a bit grim but definitely interesting. I will look out for this one!
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That sounds really interesting. Great synopsis!
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Well, this sounds really good — I think I’d enjoy it. Thanks for the review!
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We received the UK edition in the store where I work recently and I wondered if it’s good enough to read. Glad to find it here.
But this also tells me how out of touch I have been on the blogsphere! 🙂
I am back!
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Hi Stefanie!
I always read your blog but I’ve never left comments before.
I just finished reading this book in Italian (I’m Italian, in fact), and I’ve read your comment just now – I didn’t want to read it before reading the book.
Here in Italy you have to either love it or hate it. My opinion is that it is quite a good book, even though quite overrated.
But what I wanted to ask you is something else. You see, I’m very interested in translation and such, and I wanted to ask you a couple of things.
Does it really say, in the English translation, that Alice starts to struggle to get her ski pants down but fails to do so before her bowels let go? And that Mattia is offered a job from an English university?
I’m quite interested, because in the original it isn’t like that: Alice doesn’t feel her bowels wanting to let go, she just feels like every morning and only afterwards does she realize that her bowels did let go. And the author never says in the original where the university that offered a job to Mattia is. It just hints that it is in Northern Europe, and one can quite easily understand that it is in Germany – however, definitely in a country where the original language is not English, since it is said that Mattia doesn’t understand it and his first day he has a colleague translating from that language into English for him.
I’m quite curious, sometimes the publishing houses decide to make some strange changes in the translation…
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Hi Marina! Thanks for you comment. I tried to find the book to make sure I correctly answered your questions but it has disappeared somewhere. So let me cast back into my memory and see what I can pull out.
Alice leaves the class because she has to pee and she was planning on wetting herself in her ski suit like usual. Then, If I recall correctly, she realizes too late she has to do more than that and then my memory fails me. She may not have been trying to pull he ski pants down, but somehow I recall she was struggling to find a place she could relieve herself.
My translation does not say the university where Mattias was offered a job but I seem to recall when he got a letter regarding the job it was noted that is came from England. How interesting that the original has it in Germany! Maybe it got changed for the English translation?
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That’s quite weird, in fact! Thanks for your kind reply, I’m very interested in such processes that go on in translation…
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I find it very interesting that in the original the university isn’t in England. In the Spanish translation you first get the impression that it is in Germany (the letter of invitation has “gothic characters” in the name).
In the cafeteria the cook asks him something “in his language or perhaps in English” and he replies in English “I don’t understand”. Alberto then speaks to him at first in English, then translates into (I assume) Italian – it’s presented in Spanish but not in italics. (When Sol calls Alice “mi amorcito” it’s always in italics, and so is all the English, so I presume that a) any speech not in italics should be understood to be in Italian; b) in the original Sol speaks Italian but says “mi amorcito” in Spanish).
On both occasions when he talks to taxi drivers it’s in English. Is it in German in the original, in English, or in Italian? I suppose taxi drivers might speak English in tourism-oriented cities anywhere in Europe, but I would expect Mattia to speak enough of the local language after 9 years to say “Stop here please”.
So I conclude that it’s in England, Scotland, or Ireland. It’s probably on an east-facing coast (certainly he watches the sunrise on an east-facing coast, and I get the impression that it’s in the university town). I can’t find any university town on an east coast of an English-speaking country or Germany with two ‘k’s in the name (Kiel is the closest).
PS Does the original Italian have the same typo in the English text on Alice’s car’s mirror: “Objetcs in mirror…”?
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hi, thanx for the summary.
i have read this book, and been affected very much as Alice character resembles to me very much. however, i had no idea about the plot before reading this book. a great coincidence arranged by my literature instructor. 🙂 the story is the one existing in the daily life, and today’s world. a really good book.
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“PS Does the original Italian have the same typo in the English text on Alice’s car’s mirror: “Objetcs in mirror…”?
>>
Yes 🙂
I found this book amazing, a little bit sad at the end but I prefer so. You can reflect a lot by reading this book.
There are so many point and histories, and problems, that you just can devour the pages.
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