The Solitude of Prime Numbers

This week I decided to take a break from Charles Arrowby's incessant whining in The Sea, The Sea and decided to give some Italian literature a try. I don't actually recall reading a lot of Italians, or none that are still breathing at least.

Intrigued by the "massive" sales at Standaard Boekhandel, I decided to give De Eenzaamheid van de Priemgetallen by Paolo Giordano the once over. Prime Numbers is the first novel by a rather fetching twenty-seven year old physicist. Last year he also became the youngest author to be awarded the Premio Strega for his debut novel. Almost over night he became Italy's biggest literary star and has already been translated in over twenty languages. Even the movie rights have been sold, it doesn't get any better than that.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers is about Alice and Mattia, who are both recovering from troubled childhoods that have left several physical and emotional wounds. They meet, find comfort in each other and yet decide to go their seperate ways. Was this the right thing to do? Will they meet again? Or are two messed up people just too much to handle? Who's to say?

Despite several rave reviews and impressive sales, I wasn't that impresssed to be honest. It's an easy read (took me two days) and has engaging characters but the story isn't gripping just depressing. Themes like anorexia, photography, auto-mutilation, guilt, math, loneliness,... are thrown in for substance but are never developed and thus remaina pure adjectives which is a shame. Stylistically the language is very simple, mundane even and that's probably why it was such a quick read. Maybe it was just me or the Dutch translation (my first "Dutch" book this year!) but I really disliked his use of words and the banality they created.

It's not a bad book, just not worthy of any awards, not even if you are a cute twenty-seven year old Italian physicist!