I just read another book last night and a couple of hours today. It’s probably the best novel I have read for a while. To be honest I’m not so sure I really enjoyed it, but it possesses some kind of power that I would rank higher than an obsession. It was ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’ by Paolo Giordano.

I got to the book simply by the title. Since I was at secondary, I’ve always been interested in prime numbers, I mean reading stories around them. When it comes to ticket numbers or codes etc., something often reminds me that prime numbers would bring bad luck—I don’t quite believe in luck, though. Seemingly I’ve sensed the ‘solitude’ of them. My birthday also creates a prime pair—I used to hate it, now when I no longer do, I still think of it as something other than just numbers.

It’s hard to say the story was all a piece of melancholy. There’s almost no climax of a typical tragedy. No one actually dies or so. No tears. Some blood bled wasn’t meant to imprint something physically distressful. But there was something, instead, spleenful and burning inside that made me wish to cry, and it was kinda annoying that I couldn’t.

The prime numbers referred to the main characters, who were like, metaphorically, a prime pair—always together, really close, but never touching. They both underwent tragic childhood that made one of them estrange himself to the society, and the other estranged by the society. However, actually every other character also lives with different sorts of solitude that they themselves would not recognize or admit.

The novel was narrated in a way that solitude would appear like something physical you could touch, and more than that, it’s solid like diamond, almost unbreakable and smartly hurtful. The only thing which can cut diamond is diamond itself, and that’s how Alice was the only one who could bring Mattia to a human life, as well as when Mattia left, Alice knew that she could never love.

What’s exceptional in this book is that, even though everyone has his or her own traumatic situation, and solitude was that obsessive, everything seems so real. Or maybe that was how it obsesses me that much.