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The Solitude of Prime Numbers: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Paolo Giordano (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 1,004 ratings
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From the author of Heaven and Earth, a sensational novel about whether a "prime number" can ever truly connect with someone else 


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, too, move on their own axis, 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 recognizes a kindred, tortured 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 intertwined: they are divisible only by themselves and each other. But the shadow of the lost twin haunts their relationship, until a chance sighting by Alice 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? And when Mattia is asked to choose between human love and his professional love — of mathematics — which will make him more complete?
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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  5. Publication date
    February 25, 2010
  6. File size
    1685 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Italian author and mathematician Giordano follows two scarred people whose lives intersect but can't seem to join in his cerebral yet touching debut. Alice and Mattia, both survivors of childhood traumas, are the odd ones out amid the adolescent masses in their high school. Mattia has never recovered from the loss of his sister, while Alice still suffers the effects of a skiing accident that damaged her physically and stunted her ability to trust. Now teenagers, Mattia, also addicted to self-injury, has withdrawn into a world of numbers and math, and Alice gains control through starving herself and photography. When they meet, they recognize something primal in each other, but timing and awkwardness keep their friendship on tenuous ground until, years later, their lives come together one last time. Giordano uses Mattia and Alice's trajectory to ask whether there are some people—the prime numbers among us—who are destined to be alone, or whether two primes can come together. The novel's bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano's spare, intense focus on his two characters. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Giordano’s deeply touching debut novel immediately thrusts the reader into the lives of two individuals, at the moment when each of their young lives takes a sharp turn toward painful solitude: Alice has been crippled in a childhood skiing accident, Mattia is consumed by guilt after playing an unintended but key role in his twin sister’s disappearance. Upon meeting in their early teens, they develop a frequently uncomfortable yet enveloping friendship. What follows is a beautiful and affecting account of the ways in which seemingly inconsequential decisions reverberate so intensely as to change a life forever. Translated from the Italian, this is a book about communication: in lacking a facility for self-expression, our stunted protagonists exist almost solely, and safely, in their own minds. Despite its heavy subject matter, it reads easily, due in part to the almost seamless translation. A quietly explosive ending completes the novel in just the fashion it was started, as an intimate psychological portrait of two “prime numbers”—together alone and alone together. --Annie Bostrom

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0030CVQ9O
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (February 25, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 25, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1685 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 1,004 ratings

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Paolo Giordano

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Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
1,004 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Cherokee Randolph
4.0 out of 5 stars A Sharing of Loneliness
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2017
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This is a love story but not a romance. A boy and a girl each of whom has endured serious misfortune in youth find each other as teenagers. They form a friendship which appears to be the only salvation for the two lonely adolescents. It is the only bulwark against persecution by their schoolmates, against the awkward distance from their parents.

But when their adolescence has finally ended, neither one appears to offer much resistance to the forces which come to separate them, both personally and geographically. And when they are briefly reunited, it is clear that what they had had was a loving alliance, not a great love.

The book has an interesting and rather appropriate title. The Solitude of Primes. The boy and girl are, indeed, somewhat like a ‘pair’ of primes. Two prime numbers are the closest possible neighbors (for primes) in the number hierarchy, but without a common factor with any other numbers or with each other. Alice and Mattia have no common passion, scarcely even a common interest. They understand each other’s loneliness, but there doesn’t seem to be much else going on between them. They listen to music together, but they scarcely seem to talk to each other.

The writing is very good, clear and unpretentious but interesting. This is a good book. It feels very real. The reader believes in the characters. If it really was about a powerful love, it would be more compelling to read, but a book about great love is almost impossible to write without losing the sense of reality and individual personalities. I think that is because that sort of emotion and the commonalities which give rise to it are unique in any two individuals. It cannot be recreated in the reader by even the most brilliant writer. At best, it can be suggested by its manifestations, as it is in Wuthering Heights.
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EpicFehlReader
5.0 out of 5 stars Giordano's writing ability left me in awe!
Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2014
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This was another one of my picks for the #AntiBullyReads Readathon this week, and I gotta say, I'm kinda bummed that this book doesn't seem to be more well known in the United States, but maybe I can help remedy that :-) Elsewhere in the world, this book has been translated into 39 languages and in 2008 won its Italian author, Paolo Giordano, Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega.

This story follows the lives of Alice Della Rocca and Mattia Balossino, introducing them as children in 1985, closing the story in their adulthood in 2007. Early on in their lives, both suffer traumatic experiences that affect and form them for the rest of their lives. Young Alice is pushed by her father to pursue an athletic career in skiing, but she can't find a way to get him to see that she has no inclination or natural talent for the sport, and all he can see is future Olympics. Her inexperience leads her into a skiing accident which ends up leaving her permanently crippled, though the weaker leg gets somewhat easier to hide as she gets older. What she doesn't hide is her emotional pain from the disconnect she and her parents can't seem to overcome. Her mother seems to be terminally ill with something, her father always focused on either work or his wife. Alice seems to be constantly pressed with this home atmosphere of "You could be better". At school, Alice yearns for the acceptance of popular girl / school bully Viola Bai, who requires a "test of loyalty" from all who want to be in her circle. The test she offers Alice proves to be permanently emotionally scarring to Alice. So between the teasing and looks at school about her leg and the loneliness she continues to feel at home, Alice develops anorexia... something else that follows her well into adulthood.

Then there's Mattia's story. Mattia is one half of a set of twins. While Mattia quickly proves to be highly intelligent and gifted in math and sciences, his sister Michela is severely mentally handicapped, not even able to form full sentences even by grade-school age. Mattia and Michela stick close together, but part of Mattia resents how much attention Michela requires from everyone. At times he feels "held back" by her condition, socially stifled by being associated with her. When an opportunity comes up for Mattia to attend a classmate's party, both Mattia and Michela are invited but while walking to the classmate's house, Mattia makes the spur decision to leave Michela in a nearby park while he attends the party, instructing her to stay put on a bench until he comes back. Mattia loses track of time at the party and when he comes back Michela is nowhere to be found. A search party is quickly put together, but Michela is never found. It's assumed that she fell into the nearby river and her body drifted off, never to be discovered. Mattia carries the guilt of his sister's disappearance for the rest of his life, causing him to become a "cutter" (compulsively making cuts in his skin whenever the pain gets overwhelming). As Mattia grows into his teen years, his parents seem to find him increasingly weird and creepy ... the way he is super smart but never wants to talk and seems to have no friends. So, like Alice, even his home life is isolating.

Alice and Mattia end up at the same school, both finding themselves being taunted, bullied, and / or whispered about for their traumas. Alice is instantly intrigued by Mattia, but Viola deems him a "psychopath". Alice and Mattia develop a friendship through their shared ostracism, though many aspects of the friendship prove difficult for both. They struggle to easily speak to each other and at times Alice's brusque way of speaking to Mattia comes off as borderline bullying, but there seems to be an unspoken deep bond. There lies the natural understanding, free of judgement, between them that makes the friendship so true and necessary. Whatever is said (or not said that needs to be..), they have a way of being each other's anchor in a world where no one else seems to understand them. At least until graduation day hits and life takes its natural course, which sometimes means people have to part. Mattia is offered a spot at a university in Spain and when he goes to tell Alice, she lashes out at him, saying horrible, hurtful things. We always hurt the ones we love the most, eh? Well, Mattia swallows the hurt, burying himself in work. The argument causes a silence between him and Alice for years, but then the moment she calls for him, like the true friend he comes running.

It's during these later adult years that a moment comes up which forces Alice to face her past demons. What she decides to do ... I didn't 100% agree with. I was with her through a lot of it, but that last little decision I felt went too far. Karma doesn't need to be that big a bitch. Sometimes you just gotta be the better person and let it go.

Along with Alice and Mattia, there's also the side stories of Denis and Soledad. Denis is perhaps the one other friend Mattia has through most of his school days, but their friendship is strained as well because Denis is in love with Mattia, Mattia is aware of it but doesn't want to encourage Denis. The story then sheds light on Denis' struggles with becoming comfortable in his homosexuality, eventually getting to a place where he and Mattia can honestly be just friends. Soledad is the housekeeper in Alice's home as well as Alice's unofficial nanny-figure. Alice is sometimes seen bullying Soledad into giving her what she wants, even if it might cost Soledad her job. Soledad also has a backstory of a husband who walked out on her, but to hide / avoid the shame of it all, she creates a story which makes her a grieving widow for a beloved husband, allowing her to have social respectability rather than shaming.

While this story doesn't solely focus on easily identifiable bullies, I liked how it brought to light all the subtle ways people, children and adults alike, can be bullied, and how it can affect them for the rest of their lives. It doesn't always have to be physical. In fact, I'd say emotional abuse tends to last a hell of a lot longer than the temporary pain of being physically slammed into or up against something. This novel also addresses the crime of parents who never really get to know their children as individuals, embracing their uniqueness or allowing them to just be who they are suppose to be, instead forcing agendas and the unlived dreams of the parents onto them. It's just tragic.

This book is so beautifully written, it'll be on my suggestions list from now on!
5 people found this helpful
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Beowulf
3.0 out of 5 stars not much math
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2023
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I enjoy Math and read this book about the lives of several people over the course of about 2 decades. I chose it because it had an interesting title and was recommended in an Audio book I listened to. However, it was disappointing and a bit dark and the reference to prime numbers in the title was slim at best. Both protagonists were damaged people caused by childhood events. This engages compassion for them, but the novel is not uplifting. I enjoy Russian literature, which is dark, but this novel was too dark for me though I did finish it merely to see what finally happens .... read it when you do NOT want to feel uplifted...
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L Vera
5.0 out of 5 stars Bien
Reviewed in Mexico on June 1, 2023
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Fue un regalo y gustó mucho. Entrega en tiempo y forma.
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Leonida
5.0 out of 5 stars Strange, beautiful, challenging
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2016
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I read this was a novel about teenage angst. But this was different, and strangely detached. Maybe because the traumas that each of the protagonists experience are only to be guessed at, while their consequent self-inflicted punishments have - to me, at least - something of a dream about them. Absolutely no self-pity here, and no sentimentality. As someone said in a Guardian review, Italian novels are usually rather florid and intense. This one, though, is different. The prose is spare and strangely lacking in emotion, although emotion is expressed indirectly - and that is very refreshing. I have only read it the once, but am sure that on a second reading it would reveal more.
2 people found this helpful
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Evgenia
5.0 out of 5 stars Very touching story
Reviewed in Germany on August 11, 2015
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I read this book already sometime ago and wanted to give it to my friend as a present. Whoever was reading this book absolutely loved it!
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Soham Chakraborty
3.0 out of 5 stars Melancholy and solitude
Reviewed in India on September 10, 2013
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A prime number is a lonely thing. It can be divided only by 1 and by itself. Think of 3,5,7,11,13,17,19 and keep counting. Now there is another concept called Twin Prime. Twin primes are prime numbers which are separated by one even number. Take for example 17 and 19. After 17 and 19, the next twin primes are 41 and 43 and then 59, 61; then 107 and 109. As per prime number theorem, the more you go into the hierarchy of numbers, the lesser is the opportunity to find twin primes. So, what happens to the numbers 2760889966649 and 2760889966651. They are too lonely to be even counted. The first one is for Mattia and second one is for Alice.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers is that kind of a book that by seeing the cover, you get a feeble glimpse of what is underneath it. And that is loneliness. That is profound loneliness, lonely because she was not accepted anywhere and lonely because he doesn't care to be among others. But when they meet, then also it doesn't create a uniform of singularity, they remain twin primes.

Mattia is someone who can't say that he loves Alice, yet she is the one to whom he can be himself, not talking, spending hours lazily just to kill the time so that the new week can begin. He has scars on his hands, deep scars. He inflicted them on him. He suffers from auto-mutilation. But the scars on the hands are visible, what is not visible is the scar in his heart. The frozen scar in his heart is beyond healing because that reminds him how he abandoned his little kid sister to go to his first birthday party. He left his sister in the park to be among people. And then the tragedy stricken Mattia found his salvation in mutilating himself and in dark, deep blankets of solitude. A solitude that keeps him sane, a solitude where no one can enter. Every key to that is in his mind and even then he doesn't know how hidden, how limitless that loneliness is.

Alice is someone who walks in a circular rhythmic manner. That's not entirely visible but careful observation on her, might show this. Mattia observes. Alice has no sense in one of her legs since she fell face-first on ice in a skiing accident. She didn't want to ski but her father wanted. She is also not particularly good-looking for wooing the boys in her school. Her furtive glances leave no mark. On a twisted tale of fate, she meets Mattia as the other girls form a plan to eradicate Alice's no-boyfriend charm. They meet but when Alice asks Mattia to kiss her, his gaze descends to the trapezoid structures of the floor carpet and the geometric projections of the curtains. He doesn't know how to kiss, how to say yes, has never said it, he is someone who likes absolute solitude and has merged himself into the abyss. Still they come out from the room hand in hand and Mattia observes that his fingers seamlessly slide into her fingers and when she walks holding his hand, she doesn't seem to limp, as if her weight is being balanced by his movement.

The Solitude of Prime numbers is a work of creative intelligence. The chapters exude loneliness. This provocative portrayal of young-adult life isn't just another book on the genre. The carefully woven plot and how Alice's and Mattia's life never form a full circle, is bound to make you feel lonely. They are for each other, absolutely for each other and they know it. But there is an even number between them, be it Fabio or Michela or Alberto or their work. Salvation is not for twin primes, they can't form a single, seamless entity. They are bound to be close but worlds apart. And even when they are worlds apart, they are close at heart. Even when they lose themselves into one another, they are alone. Alone when they are together and together when they are alone. This debut novel from Italian physicist Paolo Girodano is a seductive piece of art, intelligently thought-provoking which with sublime subtlety displays Italian life and education and family. It stands true to the theory of prime numbers - a prime number is divisible by 1 and the number only.

This is a beautiful ode to melancholy and solitude. Deserves to be read and loved.
4 people found this helpful
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Jesus Abel
5.0 out of 5 stars Buenas condiciones
Reviewed in Mexico on April 30, 2020
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El producto llegó en buen estado y condiciones
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