NYT Reviews The Solitude of Prime Numbers

April 27, 2010

Paolo Giordano’s first novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, is the winner of the Premio Straga, Italy’s most coveted book prize. The New York Times reviewed the recently published American English version.

Giordano, a physicist, took his title from mathematics and created a main character, Mattia Balossino, who has a passion for the subject.

Times reviewer Liesl Schilinger wrote,  “Mattia finds magical potency in the tantalizing distance between numeric prime pairs — numbers like 11 and 13, which cannot be divided except by 1 or themselves, and that seem connected because of their proximity, but are not…The existence of such pairs, which appear with greater and greater rarity as numbers climb into the millions and beyond, leads Mattia to suspect that solitude is the true destiny.”

The book has sold more than a million copies in Italy, no small feat in a country that, according to The Times, lacks a robust reading culture. Schilinger attributes its success to “the extraordinary magnetism of Giordano’s voice and the human interest lurking behind the left-brain mathiness of his title.”

Read the full review here.

Source: The New York Times (April 9, 2010).