Damage

Still on the subject of The Solitude of Prime Numbers and its main characters, part of the undoubted power and drive of the novel lies in its recognition of how easily people can be damaged. I suppose the obvious example is Mattio's twin sister who is literally retarded, but it's difficult to think of a single character depicted by Giordano who is recognisably normal. Even Fabio, initially presented as a rather suave, self-assured doctor seems to have some kind of odd need for Alice, who is clearly not an attractive young lady in the usual sense. The writer is particularly good at conveying how uneasy so many of his characters are in their own bodies - a defining trait of adolescence, well, for geeks like me at least. 

In this respect the book seems to me to deal with an essential truth: people really are not normal. But in its intensity of vision I think it fails to recognise another truth: most people are very good at pretending to be normal, and somehow that's how most of us get through the day. In this respect humour helps enormously, and in retrospect I realise there wasn't much of that in the novel. Nor was it an obvious quality of The Garden of Evening Mists, the other novel I recently finished reading. I suppose that's why I never felt quite comfortable with either text, despite finding much to admire in both.