by Kelly Pickerill
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, 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. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn’t do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
Paolo Giordano’s international bestseller from Italy, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, chronicles the relationship between two misfits: Mattia, a math genius who, because of his intense remorse for abandoning his twin sister when they were very young, punishes himself with burns and cuts, and Alice who, after a crippling skiing accident as a young girl, nurtures a skewed perspective of her body and anorexic eating habits.
The novel follows Alice and Mattia through their solitary lives, beginning with a recounting of the events that severely affected them as children and picking up when they meet as adolescents. Recognizing in each other an inability to connect with others and to master the “machinery of life,” as they become adults Alice and Mattia cling to each other while managing never really to touch. Then Mattia decides to accept a mathematics grant at a university in England, and Alice fumbles to find a connection to the world without him.
Such a novel, in the hands of a less adept writer, could quickly turn into a melodrama, but Giordano’s debut reads more like intricate portraits of people whose loneliness has been etched in relief. Even the “adjusted” adults in the novel, the parents of Alice and Mattia, Alice’s housekeeper, Sol, and the successful doctor Alice marries (she spends much time at the beginning of their relationship noticing his “normalcy”), struggle to reach beyond themselves.
While reading Solitude, I couldn’t keep myself from noting the insightful ways Giordano portrayed the struggle to connect with another — I am against underlining for the most part, so by the end of the book I was repeating numbers, much like Mattia would do, in order to remember pages and chapters that I wanted to go back to. The quote above is one of them; it’s the opening of chapter 21. There were also chapters 11, 15, 20, and pages 77, 115, and 131. I’ll refrain from sharing all of those with you, but I would like to end with the conclusion to which Mattia comes after the passage above, which gives the title of this impressive novel its significance:
Twin primes are pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered. Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.
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