Misfits

It took me a couple of days to read Paolo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, one more than Fifi needed. In fact, I read the book because of Fifi. She bought it using the book tokens I got from doing the Lit Seminar this year, the first time she's picked something that might generally be seen as an adult work of fiction. I was intrigued by her choice at the time, and struck by her enthusiasm for the novel, so I borrowed it from her ahead of coming to KL. And now I must say I'm intrigued to ask her in more detail what she made of it.

I suppose that to some degree my response to the novel has been curiously coloured by the fact she read it first. In some ways it strikes me as something that teenagers would respond to, dealing as it does with two protagonists who seem very much stuck in adolescence, even at the conclusion of the story, by which time they'd be around thirty. The focus is very much on relationships, of various kinds. It outlines their rather miserable childhoods in sometimes painful detail - the girl is anorexic; the boy cuts his hands - and we're certainly made to feel for them as lonely outsiders. But there's also a sense of objectivity in their depiction and some very fine scenes dealing with a more obviously adult understanding of the world. (The final argument between the girl, Alice, and her husband, Fabio, is superbly done, and evokes sympathy for the husband in ways you would not expect from the early parts of the story dealing with Alice.)

Also I must admit I assumed that the story would end in the protagonists coming together - and they don't. That in itself demands a deeper reading. I find myself resisting any kind of leap to judgment on this one - except to say that being made to inhabit the worlds of others seems to me in itself a useful exercise, specially when those worlds are painful places.