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Paolo Giordano
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Book
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Publisher | Black Swan | ||
ISBN | 978-055277547 | ||
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Reviewer
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Anne
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Synopsis
A prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia also move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found. These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined. But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface. A meditation on loneliness and love, "The Solitude of Prime Numbers" asks, can we ever truly be whole when we're in love with another?
Review
As a mathematician I was drawn to the title of this book Two events from their childhood define Alice and Mattia's lives . Seven-year-old Alice is forced by her father to attend skiing lessons. One day, while she's waiting to go skiing, she dirties herself. She tries to get back home and falls, breaking her leg badly and earning herself a permanent limp. Mattia has a developmentally challenged twin sister, Michela, who poves to be a great embassment to him, and one day he leaves her in a park, with the promise he will be coming back to take her home soon. When he gets back, however, she's disappeared.
These two events shape the lives of the main characters: in her teens, Alice becomes anorexic, while Mattia is a math genius, probably suffering from Asperger's syndrome. Following her mother's death from cancer, Alice leaves university to pursue a career as a photographer, while Mattia goes on to earn his degree in Mathematics.
The title refers to Mattia's conviction that he and Alice are twin primes, that is two prime numbers which are separated by only one even number. So close yet so seperate.
I found the plot a bit frustrating and sometimes I was angered. As a mathematician I think of prime numbers as the most beautiful set of numbers, the atoms of mathematics from which any other number may be made. - Not as odd disfunctional beings. The story is told in an episodic method with snapshots that reveal just part of the story and only gives the reader glimpses of the characters. A bit of a disappointment. Perhaps there has been something lost in the translation from the original Italian or it was just the frustration of reading it as a mathematician, but then surely the author as a scientist would have some feelings about the beauty of a prime number!
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