Paolo Giordano
How morbidly charming," was my first thought, upon reading Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 was more, "How horribly morbid," and with that I turned off the light to go to sleep.
Halfway there, I was awoken by one of my existentially discomfiting mortality flashes - a visceral reminder that life is fragile and finite, a lonely pageant of the ho-hum punctuated by grief and joy. I hadn't been so rudely awoken in ages. I thought I'd expunged my mortality flashes. This dark, funny, elegiac and affecting novel by 27-year-old Italian physicist and poet Paolo Giordano proved a powerful catalyst for their resurrection.
Giordano wrote The Solitude of Prime Numbers at night (as he recently described in an essay on The Huffington Post website). He was starting out on his doctoral research and there was an implicit competition over who among his colleagues would be the last to leave the office. Giordano wrote until 1 a.m.; the book that emerged to see the light of day, his first, won him Italy's prestigious Premio Strega literary prize and has been translated into 30-plus languages.
"Looking back on the book now," he said, "I realize that the dominant emotion in the lives of the characters is fear, my fear, because the night, as we all know, is the realm of anxiety, even for grownups."
The novel traces the fears that take root in childhood, during those years of magnified, magically nonsensical thinking, and follows the resultant neuroses and ticks of his two troubled protagonists, Alice and Mattia, as they stumble into and around adulthood.
In Chapter 1, little Alice Della Rocca trundles off to her dreaded ski lessons one foggy morning during Christmas vacation. She soils herself and escapes AWOL down the hill, flying over a cliff and landing face down in the snow with a broken fibula. Night falls and she waits for rescue.
In Chapter 2, Mattia Balossino trudges off to a friend's birthday party. It's the first party he has ever been invited to, and he's miffed that he has in tow his severely developmentally delayed twin sister, Michela. He takes a detour into the neighbourhood park, leaves Michela there by a picnic table among some trees, telling her to stay put, he'll pick her up on his way home. When he looks for her in the darkness, she is nowhere to be found, never to be seen again.
These childhood traumas make Alice and Mattia lifelong misfits, variously physically and psychologically scarred. Alice's physical scar, a gimpy leg, morphs her into a clumsy anorexic. The man she ultimately marries (not Mattia) loves food. One night, he cooks her a sumptuous multi-course meal. When he leaves the room to retrieve more wine, she smuggles her stuffed tomato into the bathroom. "She locked herself in, lifted the seat, and the toilet smiled at her as if saying leave it to me." But the toilet floods, as do Alice's emotions.
Mattia exorcizes his emotional turmoil, his guilt, by cutting and burning himself. When, well into his 20s, he manages his first one-night stand and loses his virginity (not to Alice), terrible memories come flooding back. "He reached his left hand under the bed and began rubbing his thumb against the iron netting. In the darkness he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked it. The taste of the blood calmed him for a few seconds."
Alice and Mattia meet in high school and orbit one another thereafter. They seem like the perfect soulmates, providing one another the solace they fail to find elsewhere. They come tantalizingly close to uniting, in a dance that Giordano describes in the quantum dimension with transfixing space-time detail.
The novel gets its title and poignant mathy conceit from Mattia, a mathematics whiz, who sees something of himself and Alice in prime numbers, numbers divisible only by one and themselves (and numbers thought to have a fundamental connection to quantum physics). In his first year at university, he becomes especially enamoured of "twin primes," two primes that are close to one another, like 17 and 19, "but there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching." It is an apt metaphor, Alice and Mattia as twin primes, "alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other."
Mattia muses that prime numbers would prefer to be normal 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."
Siobhan Roberts is working on a book about Princeton mathemagician John Horton Conway.