The Solitude of Prime Numbers – Paolo Giordano

Written in Italian in 2008, 271 pages.
Two kids in Italy go through a trauma that changes their lives forever. Each kid and his own trauma, there is no connection between them back then. They grow up scarred and lonely, each one of them tries to find solace by physically harming oneself. They meet in high school and drawn to each other, but their internal scars don’t let them get really close to each other and close the gap between them.
The boy is a genius. He escapes to the world of numbers and math. Everything he sees he interprets in terms of mathematics. He thinks of himself and the girl as these pairs of prime numbers that only one number separates between them, so close but can never really touch.
I liked the way math was combined into the story, and the analogies the boy uses. I could understand to his preference of a world where everything makes sense and can be explained with simple (or not so simple, but at least known and sensible) rules, unlike the mysterious world of human relationship.
But I didn’t like the story itself. The love story wasn’t convincing and I didn’t enjoy reading about it. After finishing the story I felt it is pointless and incomplete, like it just ended arbitrarily. I wouldn’t recommend this book.
One small thing that bothered me: the author is a mathematician, not a biologist, but still he could avoid a very common mistake: identical twins are identical in everything, including gender. There cannot be identical twins when one of them is a girl and the other is a boy. This is a very common mistake in books, because, I guess, a girl and a boy that look exactly the same has lots of potential for a story, but I would expect a scientist to avoid this kind of mistake.