The Housekeeper and the Professor: ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ Publishers Weekly

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In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the New York Times bestselling author of America America and other acclaimed works of fiction, explores the nature of genius, jealousy, ambition, and love in several generations of a gifted family.

The adoration comes mostly from her, and though this is not at all a love story, it is certainly a story of love. Numbers are everywhere - Real, Natural, Imaginary, Perfect, Amicable, Abundant, Deficient, Triangular, Prime (including both Mersenne and Pernicious as well as Twins) to name a few. And they're all here in The Housekeeper and the Professor, which Ms. Ogawa wrote in 2007. The Professor is of mathematics and has amnesia; the housekeeper is devoted and has a son. This melange constitutes the cast of a charming story of mathematics and love, subjects with a connection that is less than obvious. But there is a connection and it is fundamental and profound.Is there much point having any sort of friendship with or giving happiness to someone who will not remember it? I have no idea if Ogawa has ever read Krauss, or if she has whether she intended to write a fictional riposte to Krauss’s Aristotelian materialism. Regardless, the two books certainly help to demonstrate what I think is the essential point of the other: It makes a fundamental difference in our lives what implicit philosophy we assimilate or adopt, perhaps without any awareness of the event. Perhaps we are simply born into one tendency or another, without the possibility of choice. Ogawa, Yoko (2003). Hakase no aishita sushiki (Japanese original edition of The Housekeeper and the Professor). Tokyo: Shinchosha. The details are in the contract I signed with the agency. I’m simply looking for someone who can help him live a normal life, like anyone else.” It’s a good story and the way the math is presented is fun, so that shouldn’t deter anyone from reading the book. The author (b. 1962) is a prolific writer with about 30 works of fiction. This book was made into a film in Japan with the title The Professor's Beloved Equation. The Memory Police and this book are her two best-known works in English.

And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence […] silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.” The novel’s protagonist and narrator, whose heart was also stolen with charming clumsiness, is a simple housekeeper who remains nameless (as is common in much of Japanese literature – perhaps a reflection of the we as opposed to the I which pervades so much of Eastern social behaviour). If we really believed the only reason for being kind to someone was the certainty that they'd remember it, the world would be full of neglected babies and toddlers, who developed into cold and disturbed adults. Fortunately, only a very few people operate that way.

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Ogawa's fine prose and enchanting characters easily wind their way into your heart as their simple story unfolds to give voice to complex ideas about The story is set in Japan. A housekeeper is hired to clean and cook for an elderly former mathematics professor who suffered a brain injury. (He’s 64 – is that elderly? lol) He can only remember new things for 80 minutes. So each day when she arrives at his house she has to re-introduce herself. This is a short novel about a woman (the housekeeper) who comes to care for her employer (the professor), who is a mathematical genius, but who also has a very limited short term memory (80 minutes). Happy Cubs opening day! 2018 has not been the reading year I had planned on so far. Real life and the stress that goes with it have gotten in the way of being able to focus on reading. Hopefully that changes. In the meantime in honor of the Cubs first home game this year, I am reposting my favorite baseball book from last year, a lovely novella that I am fortunate did not fly under my radar. The Housekeeper and the Professor was recommended to me by my Goodreads' friend Diane because she knows that I love baseball. This March, Japan is participating in the World Baseball Classic so I found this slim novel to be a reminder that America’s pastime is now played happily all over the world.