Book Details:
Author: Yōko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder
Series: Standalone
Genres: Fiction, Japanese Literature, Asia Literature, Mathematics, Adult
Page Count: 180 pages
Publisher: Berkeley Books
Published: August 29, 2003(original); February 3, 2009(English translation)
Blurb:
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.
And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.
Review:
Rating: ★★★
I always knew mathematics was beautiful to some people, just I wasn't one of them- Just as words enchant me, numbers must enchant someone else too.
I have always been infatuated with prime numbers to a degree but I didn't realize to what degree until I saw the Professor explain about them every now and then. Reading the book was watching my history collide with my recent past/present. I saw familiar mathematical terms whiz by as I turned the pages; interspersed among those familiar terms were quite a few unfamiliar, intriguing terms that I absolutely delighted in searching about. As someone who actively claims to be disillusioned with the mathematics syllabus she had to study in the past few years, I spent more time joyfully researching about mathematics in the course of reading this book.
I realize I've praised maths too much that I risk getting stripped of my math-hater tag(I dun hate maths, I just dun love it as much as I used to do in elementary school)...
The intricate tapestry of the Professor's attachment with maths was decorated with beautiful human relationships, be it his relationship with the Housekeeper and Root or be it his admiration for Enatsu. There was something so vulnerable, something so humane about some of those interactions that it just pulled me out of the book and left me thinking deeply.
Final Thoughts:
