Rave Review: "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa

Quick Summary

Type: Novel

Genre: Literary fiction

Back Cover: "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 eight minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the path. 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."

Read Time: 5 days

Rating: All-Time Favorite (5 stars)

Review

I picked this book up because of a slightly negative review that said this book had too much math and baseball in it. So naturally, I picked it up.

To be honest, I expected a book that kind of focused on sabermetrics, like Moneyball. What I got instead was a beautiful story about an unlikely and challenging friendship between two people of very different worlds. One is a brilliant mathematics professor stuck in the past, the other is the Professor's housekeeper, a single mother with a high-school education (and her son, Root). The story examines the challenges of their friendship and the compassion they feel toward each other all through the lens of beautiful mathematics.

I won't write much more because I don't want to spoil things. But the short of it is: this was just a beautiful story about life, and I absolutely loved it.