The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel
Feb 2009 · Sold by Picador
4.3star
23 reviews
Ebook
192
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
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 the Professor. 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.
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 the Professor. 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.
Ratings and reviews
4.3
23 reviews
A Google user
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January 31, 2010
I enjoyed reading "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa. This is a fascinating novel about family, memory and math. Sometimes it is an unexpected story that stays with one. I would compare this to "Life of Pi" or "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night" because of the unique voice, the quirky story and the way the book stayed with me.
I am decent at math but this book made me curious about math in the ways that I have been curious about other subjects such as technology. I think I could have been a mathematician had I the Professor for a teacher!
Keith Bates
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January 28, 2016
A good story well written. Thanks JoanBates
1 person found this review helpful
Ed Green
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May 24, 2019
This novel is elegant.
1 person found this review helpful
About the author
Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her books include The Housekeeper and the Professor, Revenge, and The Diving Pool.
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