THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS

In 2008, Paolo Giordano, an Italian physi­cist in his mid-20s, published his first novel. Called “The Solitude of Prime Numbers,” it won Italy’s most coveted book prize, the Premio Strega. Because Italy does not have a robust reading culture, the fact that this literary debut has sold more than a million copies there hints both at the extraordinary magnetism of Giordano’s voice and at the human interest lurking behind the left-brain mathi­ness of his ­title. Already, the book has been translated into more than 30 languages.

 

 

 

Giordano took his title from mathematics, which is the passion of one of his two main characters, a brainy, emotionally detached boy 

named Mattia Balossino. 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. “Between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching.” 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.” He has a friend named Alice Della Rocca, a girl (and later, woman) who’s as damaged and sociophobic as he is. Mattia sees the two of them as “twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.”

Writing in The New Yorker last fall, the doctor-writer Jerome Groopman spoke with a scientist from M.I.T., Sherry Turkle, who warned that patients often develop feelings about the robot automatons that work with them. The patients “start to relate to the object as a person,” she told him. “They begin to love it and nurture it, and feel they have to attend to the robot’s inner state.” Groopman expanded on her observation: “People begin to seek reciprocity, wanting the robot to care for them,” he wrote. The biological roots of this impulse go deep, Turkle added: “We were wired through evolution to feel that when something looks us in the eye, then someone is at home in it.” So is it a surprise if, when friends and relatives look into the eyes of Mattia or Alice (who are, after all, human beings, not robots), they imagine an emotional connection where none exists? Any love invested in them produces no yield. Nurture at your own risk.

 

 

Hamlet, by Willian Shakespeare

      The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness – from overwhelming grief to seething rage – and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.

 

INFLUENCE OF THE BOOK

 

Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature. As such, it reverberates through the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.

 

In the 1920s, James Joyce managed "a more upbeat version" of Hamlet—stripped of obsession and revenge—in Ulysses, though its main parallels are with Homer's Odyssey. In the 1990s, two women novelists were explicitly influenced by Hamlet. In Angela Carter's Wise Children, To be or not to be is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince has Oedipal themes and murder intertwined with a love affair between a Hamlet-obsessed writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crime and punishment

Crime and Punishment  is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is the first great novel of his "mature" period of writing.

 

 

 

 

The book focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless vermin. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that some people are naturally capable of such things, and even have the right to do them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov justifies his actions by connecting himself mentally with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.

 

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BOOK

 

Raskolnikov's dreams have a symbolic meaning, which suggests a psychological view. The dream of the mare being whipped has been suggested as the fullest single expression of the whole novel, symbolizing gratification and punishment, contemptible motives and contemptible society, depicting the nihilistic destruction of an unfit mare, the gratification therein, and Rodion's disgust and horror, as an example of his conflicted character.

 

Also, the place where the novel takes place has a special symbolism: Saint Petersburg. The above opening sentence of the novel has a symbolic function: Russian critic Vadim K. Kozhinov argues that the reference to the "exceptionally hot evening" establishes not only the suffocating atmosphere of Saint Petersburg in midsummer but also "the infernal ambience of the crime itself". Dostoyevsky was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city.

 

 

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

 

 

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow. He was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died suddenly in 1837, when he was 15, and around the same time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute.

 

In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and, later, A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages and have sold around 15 million copies. Dostoyevsky influenced a multitude of writers, from Anton Chekhov and James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre.

 

 

 

 

 

CALIGULA By Albert Camus

Caligula is a play written by Albert Camus, begun in 1938 (the date of the first manuscript being 1939) and published for the first time in May 1944 by Éditions Gallimard. Its plot revolves around the historical figure of Caligula, a Roman Emperor famed for his cruelty and seemingly insane behavior.

Caligula, a relatively kind prince at the beginning, but later on he is told about the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, and he realises that "men die and they are not happy." Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.

But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men.

The play was later the subject of numerous revisions. It was part of what the author called the "Cycle of the Absurd", with the novel The Stranger (1942) and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). A number of critics have reported the piece to be existentialist; however, Camus always denied belonging to this philosophy.

There is also a film based in this play. It was directed directed by Tinto Brass and starring by Malcolm McDowell, here is the trailer:

The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

 The Picture of Dorian Gray is verily Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece – a book that deals with so many things, and in such subtle yet intricate detail and with such a force, that one is left wondering about the integrity of one’s opinion after having read the entire novel. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.”Dealing with things in ever-double shades, of both a subjective and objective viewpoint, and through both art and faith, Wilde’s work has a jostling affect on the reader. He constructs a typical modern man’s life which is based upon a mode of existence vested entirely in subjective experiences and divorced of anything otherwise. A hedonism that is both very dark yet very attractive, very pleasant and enticing – a religion of faithlessness  that removes all limits, save those of one’s mortality, and even they are pushed the farthest with the fictitious character of Dorian Gray whose exuberant youth never withers. 

What adds the tinge of deliciousness to the pages are Lord Henry’s dialogues, him being undoubtedly one of the wittiest characters I have read of and who utters most of the sentences which are then to become eternal ‘golden quotes’ of Wilde, to be quoted and re-quoted in fiction magazines and essays. Being a hedonist who wouldn’t accept even the very brand, Henry is a befitting example of one who consumes himself entirely in pleasure, even when restrained and somewhat refined. He refuses to belong to any faction, of any nature whatsoever, and lives life at the whim – ‘living in the moment’ to quote the popular cliché.

Wilde quite beautifully depicts the dullness of the persistence, even of the most exquisite pleasures, and through that, provides the best argument against hedonism itself – but he seems more inclined to give the ruling in the hedonist’s favor, conceding with the proper sentence that life would be but worthless without such joys, such wonders, such passionate undertakings and sinful indulgences as had been committed by Dorian Gray. In a way, he expounds both the argument and the counter-argument side-by-side until each is consumed by the other and their product, Gray, is consumed by their contest.

Around 20 movies and plays have been made based on this indispensable classic. 

If you have enjoyed and understood this piece of literature, you won´t lose your time reading other literary pieces of work by Oscar Wilde, as The Phantom Of Canterville.

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcala de Henares, a town 20 miles from Madrid, on September 29, 1547. He was named Miguel for Saint Michael, whose patron day is September 29. Being the son of a barber-surgeon, he traveled around a lot, moving wherever his father's services were needed. His family was large; he was only the fourth son out of what was to become seven children in total. Not much is known about his educational background.

In 1570, he left Spain for Italy, a move usually done by the Spaniards of his time to further their careers. Once there he joined the Spanish infantry in Naples. In 1571, a Turkish fleet invaded Cyprus, an island country near Greece. This move made the confrontation between the Turks and the Spanish infantries located in nearby Italy inevitable. Cervantes valiantly fought in the Gulf of Lepanto, an area near Greece. He was badly wounded in his left hand and thus earned the nickname "Manco de Lepanto" (Maimed of Lepanto). After that, he continued fighting in the Mediterranean.

Something incredible happened when he tried to come back home to Spain in 1575. His ship was captured by pirates and he was taken as a slave to Algiers, a country in northern Africa. It is believed that his life as a slave from 1575 to 1580 became the source of inspiration for some episodes in Don Quixote. In 1580, his family, with the help of the friars of a Trinitarian monastery, was finally able to raise the ransom money necessary to free him.

Spain had changed drastically during Cervantes's absence. Prices had increased dramatically and the standard of living for people like his middle-class family had fallen. As a sad consequence, Cervantes would spend the rest of his life employment-hopping and being continually short of money. But it was his return to Spain which began his career as a major literary figure. In 1585, he published his first long work, La Galatea, a prose pastoral romance. Its publication brought him success with the reading public. After this pastoral romance, Cervantes decided to try his luck as a dramatist. His plays were average in comparison to the Don Quixote which he was to write in 1604.

When the First Part of Don Quixote came out in 1605, it was an immediate success. It was such a success that it was translated into English, French, and Italian within the next twenty years. In 1615, a year before his death, the Second Part came out and was just as successful. It is believed that the Second Part is richer and more profound than the First.

Unfortunately, all of this success resulted in no profit for Cervantes, who had sold the publishing rights of his work. The other major works that he published were 12 Novelas Ejemplares (12 Exemplay Novels, 1613) and Ocho Comedias y Ocho Entremeses (Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes, 1615). In the latter, Cervantes poignantly bids goodbye to the world in the prologue; he obviously foresaw his imminent death.

The influence of Don Quixote on later literature was astounding. The work, which is in essence a parody of the time's popular chivalric romances, had been written in a realistic style. Cervantes' use of irony came to be admired and Don Quixote came to be seen at times as a comic hero and at others as a tragic hero driven by impossible dreams. It is believed that the influence of this work can be seen in such writers as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Benito Perez Galdos and in painters like William Hogarth and Pablo Picasso.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, England. She was a crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for the 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote the world's longest-running play The Mousetrap.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 4 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the world's most widely published books.

According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, and her books have been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time. In 1971, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

Christie created the most iconic sleuths ever to grace the pages of murder mystery novels; Poirot and Miss Marple, as well as Tommy and Tuppence, Ariadne Oliver, Harley Quin, Parker Pyne, Hastings, and Chief Inspector Japp. (Click on them to know more)

You can see her bibliography below (only novels are included)

Year published	Title	Detectives
1920	The Mysterious Affair at Styles	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Inspector Japp
1922	The Secret Adversary	Tommy and Tuppence
1922	The Murder on the Links	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Monsieur Giraud
1924	The Man in the Brown Suit	Colonel Race Anne Beddingfeld
1925	The Secret of Chimneys	Superintendent Battle Anthony Cade
1926	The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Hercule Poirot Inspector Raglan
1927	The Big Four	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Inspector Japp
1928	The Mystery of the Blue Train	Hercule Poirot
1929	The Seven Dials Mystery	Superintendent Battle Eileen "Bundle" Brent
1930	The Murder at the Vicarage	Miss Marple Inspector Slack
1931	The Sittaford Mystery also Murder at Hazelmoor	Emily Trefusis Inspector Narracott
1932	Peril at End House	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Inspector Japp
1933	Lord Edgware Dies also Thirteen at Dinner	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Inspector Japp
1934	Murder on the Orient Express also Murder in the Calais Coach	Hercule Poirot
1934	Why Didn't They Ask Evans? also The Boomerang Clue	Bobby Jones Frankie Derwent
1935	Three Act Tragedy also Murder in Three Acts	Hercule Poirot Mr. Satterthwaite
1935	Death in the Clouds also Death in the Air	Hercule Poirot Inspector Japp
1936	The A.B.C. Murders also The Alphabet Murders	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Chief Inspector Japp
1936	Murder in Mesopotamia	Hercule Poirot Captain Maitland Dr. Reilly
1936	Cards on the Table	Hercule Poirot Colonel Race Superintendent Battle Ariadne Oliver
1937	Dumb Witness also Poirot Loses a Client also Mystery at Littlegreen House	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings
1937	Death on the Nile	Hercule Poirot Colonel Race
1938	Appointment with Death	Hercule Poirot
1938	Hercule Poirot's Christmas also Murder for Christmas also A Holiday for Murder	Hercule Poirot
1939	Murder is Easy also Easy to Kill	Superintendent Battle Luke Fitzwilliam
1939	Ten Little Niggers also And Then There Were None also Ten Little Indians	Sir Thomas Legge Inspector Maine
1940	Sad Cypress	Hercule Poirot
1940	One, Two, Buckle My Shoe also An Overdose of Death also The Patriotic Murders	Hercule Poirot Chief Inspector Japp
1941	Evil Under the Sun	Hercule Poirot Colonel Weston Inspector Colgate
1941	N or M?	Tommy and Tuppence
1942	The Body in the Library	Miss Marple Inspector Slack
1942	Five Little Pigs also Murder in Retrospect	Hercule Poirot
1942	The Moving Finger also The Case of the Moving Finger	Miss Marple
1944	Towards Zero also Come and Be Hanged	Superintendent Battle Inspector James Leach
1944	Death Comes as the End	Hori
1945	Sparkling Cyanide also Remembered Death	Colonel Race Chief Inspector Kemp
1946	The Hollow also Murder After Hours	Hercule Poirot Inspector Grange
1948	Taken at the Flood also There is a Tide...	Hercule Poirot
1949	Crooked House	Charles Hayward Chief Inspector Taverner
1950	A Murder is Announced	Miss Marple Chief Inspector Craddock
1951	They Came to Baghdad	Victoria Jones
1952	Mrs McGinty's Dead also Blood Will Tell	Hercule Poirot Ariadne Oliver
1952	They Do It with Mirrors also Murder with Mirrors	Miss Marple Inspector Curry
1953	After the Funeral also Funerals are Fatal	Hercule Poirot Inspector Morton Mr. Goby
1953	A Pocket Full of Rye	Miss Marple
1954	Destination Unknown also So Many Steps to Death	Mr. Jessop Captain Leblanc
1955	Hickory Dickory Dock also Hickory Dickory Death	Hercule Poirot Inspector Sharpe
1956	Dead Man's Folly	Hercule Poirot Ariadne Oliver
1957	4.50 from Paddington also What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! also Murder She Said	Miss Marple Chief Inspector Craddock
1958	Ordeal by Innocence	Arthur Calgary Superintendent Huish
1959	Cat Among the Pigeons	Hercule Poirot Inspector Kelsey Adam Goodman
1961	The Pale Horse	Inspector Lejeune Ariadne Oliver Mark Easterbrook
1962	The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side also The Mirror Crack'd	Miss Marple Chief Inspector Craddock
1963	The Clocks	Hercule Poirot Det. Inspector Hardcastle Colin Lamb
1964	A Caribbean Mystery	Miss Marple
1965	At Bertram's Hotel	Miss Marple
1966	Third Girl	Hercule Poirot Ariadne Oliver Chief Inspector Neele Mr. Goby
1967	Endless Night	Sergeant Keen
1968	By the Pricking of My Thumbs	Tommy and Tuppence
1969	Hallowe'en Party	Hercule Poirot Ariadne Oliver
1970	Passenger to Frankfurt	Stafford Nye
1971	Nemesis	Miss Marple
1972	Elephants Can Remember	Hercule Poirot Ariadne Oliver
1973	Postern of Fate Last novel Christie wrote	Tommy and Tuppence
1975	Curtain Poirot's last case, written about 35 years earlier.	Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings
1976	Sleeping Murder Miss Marple's last case, written about 35 years earlier	Miss Marple

You can see below a long documantary wich tells everything you can know about her:

If you wish to know more, please click on  this link to go to the official website