When I found this book in a shop, the title stopped me cold—that strange pairing of human loneliness with the abstract mathematics of prime numbers. Prime numbers are integers with no divisors except 1 and themselves. As you move through the sequence of integers, primes grow scarcer and more distant from one another. Among them are special pairs called twin primes: two primes separated by only one other number—close, but never quite touching. This is Alice and Mattia, the protagonists of Paolo Giordano's powerful debut novel. Mattia is a brilliant boy with a retarded twin sister, Michela, whose presence burdens him. His brilliance set against her disability creates an imbalance his parents cannot ignore. They burden Mattia with the duty to care for her, as though his gifts must compensate for hers. Ashamed in front of his friends, weighed down by obligation, Mattia one day leaves her at a park to go to a party, promising to collect her later. When he returns, she is gone.
Alice is a girl pushed by her father into skiing—a sport she hates. His relentless expectations, the bitter cold, the cumbersome gear—all of it leaves her feeling clumsy and inadequate. During a school ski excursion, she wanders from the group and becomes lost in the fog. Terrified and humiliated, she struggles back down alone and breaks her leg. The limp that follows will mark her for life.
"The Solitude of Prime Numbers" traces these two solitudes, born from different events but equally irreversible in their consequences. It follows their meeting, their slow drift toward each other. From the start, Alice and Mattia recognize themselves in their difference, in their existence as prime numbers.
Mattia thinks: "He and Alice were like that—twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to truly touch." Their story is a metaphor for all of us: the desire to find that one person who resembles us most, that nearby prime number we might actually reach, with whom a profound sharing might be possible. It is also the story of someone who feels his own difference acutely, who first struggles to seem normal, then, suffocated by inadequacy, searches for someone willing to accept him as he is.
I don't know if the author has ever encountered disability himself or lived through the helplessness that difference can bring, but he shows an uncommon sensitivity in handling so complex and subtle a theme. In telling us about Mattia and Alice, Giordano never indulges in pity or easy moral judgment. His prose is spare yet moved, letting their wayward thoughts and small daily moments build the depth of their psychology. By the book's end, Giordano seems to suggest that all such efforts are doomed, that we are fated to remain separate—perhaps drawing closer, but never truly merging. Yet the novel speaks a stubborn hope: the hope that perhaps "touching" is not necessary, that the mere nearness of two souls can help them grow, flourish in their own potential, and lead them, by inscrutable paths, to accept each other.
Stefano Marchetti, 2008