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Paolo Giordano is only 27 years old. Last year, he won the Strega Prize for this novel.
Why?
There is a void in the reader's life, a void in the stomach when reading "The Solitude of Prime Numbers". A sense of unease that pervades every vein, the entire stomach, leaving one uncertain, very uncertain about what to do.
Personal possibilities are put into crisis, everything is relative, not coincidentally Paolo has a degree in Theoretical Physics. He introduced himself to the literary scene in the most humble of ways, saying nothing to anyone, first emerging with his head and then with wonderfully animated arms to write a book. He positioned himself quietly like his protagonist Mattia, writing about him. He, who as a child, experienced a great trauma, humiliated by an autistic little sister who wouldn't let him live. By abandoning her, he increased his anxieties, his guilt, and nothing was ever the same again. There is a wall of impenetrability, a sad impenetrability that Paolo recounts with grace and accuracy.
And then there is Alice, left limping due to a skiing accident. Skiing she hated, which she was forced to do, and it was her downfall, her ruin for life. Her condition always put her in a certain difficulty. Rejected by everyone, while Mattia rejected everyone, immersed in his 9s and dealing with a homosexual classmate who wants to reveal his secret.
They are prime numbers, Alice and Mattia, twin primes, numbers close but never really meeting because they are divided by an even number. They can only peer at each other. And so they do, meeting by chance, creating an indissoluble yet abnormal union. A solitude in pairs, each for a different reason. The understanding not always perfect. But mutual affection. Mattia incapable of expressing his emotions, Alice overly emotional. Tears melt the heart, tracing the parallel lives of these two characters. They endure wrongs, get back up, pretend nothing happened. They are followed from childhood to adulthood. And their journey will never be trivial, but a fabrication of normality.
Alice and Mattia are present in many people around the world. People who are confined for no particular reason, because they reject certain principles others hold dear. Hated, too.
Mattia seems the most culpable in the situation because he is the one who doesn't want contact, he is the one closed off in his secret science of movements, calculating the slope of Alice's hair. A fascinating science, but to the reader, it seems almost inedible, inconceivable, unassimilable.
Alice is the most human, but she is also the least mature. A kind girl driven by the joy of finding the first love, that first love that was long overdue, because of her inadequacy in clothing, physique, character. These are branded marks that cannot easily be erased.
Paolo Giordano provides an exemplary excursus. He follows the characters step by step, feeding them to us slowly, helping us assimilate their personal formation, which is not necessarily immutable. Time will find happiness, offer the boys a hope that maybe others don't perceive, but for them, it swells their hearts and lungs and keeps them living.
It's not easy to understand humanity. One feels only cold and solitude after reading "The Solitude of Prime Numbers".
But there is hope, and it will only be realized if it starts with us.
As Paolo Giordano himself says.
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