This book by Paolo Giordano was an international best-seller and also garnered critical acclaim, including Italy's Strega Prize in 2008.I don't quite see why.
On the one hand, it's a very accessible read, it has a catchy title and a hip-looking author, who also, intriguingly, happens to be a physicist, and it's a decent, intelligent story about a pair of misfits.
Key word: story. Not novel.
I simply can't think of a reason why this tale needed almost 300 pages to be told. It's such a simple premise. Two kids have horribly traumatic things happen: One, the boy, Mattia, is responsible for the death of his developmentally disabled sister; the other, the girl, Alice, is partially paralyzed in a skiing accident. They grow up to be social misfits with some pretty awful coping behaviors; the boy cuts himself to ribbons, the girl won't eat. They meet as teenagers and develop a deep, abstract bond, but never physically get together beyond a poignantly described kiss (“All Mattia saw was a shadow moving toward him. He instinctively closed his eyes and then felt Alice’s hot mouth on his, her tears on his cheek, or maybe they weren’t hers, and finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.”).
They are like — cue the title! — prime numbers. Divisible only by themselves and one. There are some prime numbers that almost touch — 17 and 19, 41 and 43 — but are separated by an even number. As the count increases, these "twin primes" become rarer. OK. Is this heavy-handed symbolism by a writer who's also a math geek? Or a truly compelling conceit? In a short story, I think it would be a compelling conceit, a concentrated image. In a novel, it becomes overbearing and belabored. Some of my dislike might be purely personal. I just didn't relate to the two main characters. Maybe the prime-number metaphor, rather than elucidating their experiences, ironically reinforces their mysteries.
The book is also deliberately vague. It doesn't specify what part of Italy it's set in. A "city" is mentioned. The "Alps" are mentioned. One character drives an Italian Lancia. Mattia goes to live in a northern country that you vaguely understand to be somewhere in Scandinavia, but you never know for sure. Why? Some writers seem to think this lack of detail lends their work an air of universality. I think it lends an air of imprecision.
So Paolo Giordano looks more like the actor who ought to play the part in the movie of an attractive young physicist who writes an international best-seller. There would be, of course, a scene (in a physics lab, where else?) where he explains prime numbers to his new love interest. And then there would be the mandatory scene where he writes a bunch of those twin primes on a foggy window. You know the drill.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree that it sounds more like the set-up for a short story than a longer work. Is there local or immediate detail to offset the larger scale vagueness, or is just generally vague?
Hehe. Why are we always surprised when a scientist or a fiction writer is remarkably good-lookin'? Or maybe it's the combination of being a physicist AND an award-winning author AND a super-model ... seems greedy.
ReplyDeleteActually, the immediate details are nicely done — that personal "geography," like the characters' physical scars and interpersonal interactions; there's just no sense of place, which I think is important in fiction because it's important in life. I've never been a fan of those Kafkaesque-type novels where a character has no name, or has only initials and the country is unknown but it could be any country. That kind of abstraction lessens the emotional impact for me. You don't want a cluttered book — all kinds of pop culture references and whatnot — but you do need a sense of time and place, in my view.
Oh, I’m not really surprised that he is good looking. It’s just that the twin primes thing sounds very much like a too clever by half device that would show up in a so-so movie script about a scientist-turned-fiction-writer. And he does look like he could play the part on screen.
ReplyDeleteIf the immediate details are good, then I’m probably more inclined to be sympathetic to the work. I’m with you in not caring for either the “Josef K.” abstraction or packing in endless brand names and ephemeral pop culture. But I’m not sure geography needs to be among the details. I care about place too, but there are people who don’t so much. So it could be an interesting and important thing about characters if they don’t care enough about where they are or where they’ve been to take much notice of it. But it is certainly a risk to abandon a sense of place, and aiming for “an air of universality” is probably not a good enough reason.
Your last book, “Arturo’s Island” sounded particularly appealing not only because of the details of the bright, dry, Mediterranean island, but also because of the invitation to contrast that place with the very different one of a north English moor.