The Housekeeper and the Professor
Yoko Ogawa's 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.
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.BUY THE BOOK
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Community Reviews
Touching story about a former math professor who, after an accident, has lost the ability to form new memories. The housekeeper comes to work for him and they bond through mathematical formulas and number games, and her son joins them after the professor learns he is home alone while she works. And even though they have to reintroduce themselves every day, a beautiful friendship unfolds.
This book, translated from the Japanese, was just simply charming. Written in the voice of a single mom who is a housekeeper for a cleaning agency, the book chronicles her interactions with one very special client - the professor. The professor has been injured years ago in a tragic accident and his memory only lasts 80 minutes. Each day they meet, it is as though he is meeting her for the first time. His short term memory is shot, but he is a brilliant mathematician and shares this love for and understanding of mathematics with his housekeeper and her son. A story about the love for beauty in the world and the patience that friendship requires.
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