Mathematics however, can illuminate them, can give them expression – in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so. The nameless characters suggest they are part of a myth, a larger signifier of an eternal truthĮternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. The book explores the strange equations that occur to link people together, that create families. The theory of numbers and their relationships to one another echoes quietly the growing relationship between the housekeeper and the professor and as she becomes more interested in the mathematics he loves so dearly – that one thing that grounds him and that he can never forget – so too does she become closer to this old man. The book is a tale of delicate understatement, which feels light as the cherry blossoms on the tree outside the Professors window, or as esoteric as the complex mathematics problems he enthuses over. Nothing seems to happen and yet everything does. The Professor wins a maths competition and grows older. There is an issue with his over protective sister-in-law which is resolved. They take him to a baseball game and also to the dentist. The housekeeper brings her son to work each day and a tentative friendship builds between the three, even though they will ultimately remain strangers to the Professor. The main characters, with the exception of Root, are never named. Using the housekeeper as a narrator, Ogawa unfolds a gentle, elegant story about loss, relationships, memory and the magic of mathematics.īy conventional standards, nothing much happens. He pins reminder notes about his life on his suit and he greets his housekeeper anew each day unaware of the relationship that has built up slowly between them and her son Root – nicknamed because this shape of his head resembles the sign for a square root. He can only form new memories for 80 minutes before his memory is lost again and he finds solace and the ability to cope through his love of baseball and mathematics. The book features a brilliant mathematics professor who has lost his long-term memory following a car accident in 1975. I tend to read in fits and starts nowadays, but this book had a flow and a smoothness to it, that took me away from daily life for just a few hours and was completely immersive. The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa is a beautiful, deceptively simple book that made me remember why I love reading.
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