This man, to her, is not a lover, nor a father figure, and not a big brother either (these tropes are dangerously common in tales which focus on women – with contemporary literature we sometimes are led to believe that women seek only husbands and fathers in their search for companionship).

Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression -- in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so. This novel evokes the joy of learning, and, with its somewhat eccentric yet lovable protagonists, is a pleasure to read. Highly recommended.The story is of the friendship of the housekeeper and the professor. The professor had an accident some number of years ago and his memory only lasts 80 minutes. He's quite the sight for the housekeeper, wearing a suit with post it notes pinned all over his suit to remind of things he will soon forget. He has his memory prior to the accident, but after that, it only lasts 80 minutes. But, he is a math genius and relates everything to math. When he first meets his new housekeeper, he asks her shoe size and phone number and recounting the tale of those specific numbers. And so begins their daily dance. But over time, they have an impact on one another. The housekeepers son comes around and the professor helps to teach him, the housekeeper becomes enamored by numbers, and they all share their fondness of baseball. A unlikely friendship that lasts a lifetime for the three of them. Imagine you are writer, developing a character with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. How would you manage the very specific terms of that character (e.g. his job, Consequently, Krauss’s story is one of irretrievable tragedy. Irretrievable because the gap in causality can never be recovered. The gap is a hole into which Samson's existence has fallen. He continues to be in the world but as a fundamentally altered being. That same gap exists for the Professor, and is just as materially unrecoverable. But the number-forms maintain their influence and ‘remind’ his material body on a daily basis of their existence, and his. They evoke the Professor's emotions, particularly love, which are not materially but spiritually-grounded. The Professor is debilitated but his ontology, his mode of being, is what it has always been. 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). Gorgeous, cinematic . . . The Housekeeper and the Professor is a perfectly sustained novel . . . like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters. . . . This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburo Oe and the whimsy of Murakami. The three lives connect like the vertices of a triangle.” —Susan Salter Reynolds , Los Angeles Times

It is possible in fact that Samson is permanently crippled emotionally. Loss of memory is the equivalent of a comprehensive loss of affection and affective ability. He, sadly for the reader, also has not the slightest inclination to re-kindle his marriage and considers himself none the worse for it. He is not cruel, merely ennuied; his strongest emotion is melancholy 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.” Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, The Housekeeper and the Professor has the pared-down elegance of an equation.” — O, The Oprah Magazine Okay, so I was 15 years old then, and a little bit immature to have Dennis as role model, but hey, who needs to grow up fast? The point is, I despised that teacher so much that I did not want to continue with her classes. I left maths behind. That's the sad part. She was fired a year later. Inquiries took that long. Apparently too many students gave up maths. Too late for many of us! A bond of friendship formed when they managed to get the old radio working again and baseball broadcasts could reverberate through the small garden cottage. He became a surrogate father to the boy child, while layers of silence were slowly lifted. It did not matter if they got the answers wrong to his math problems. He preferred their wild, desperate guesses to silence.Amicable Number: If two numbers are such that the sum of the perfect divisors of one number is equal to the other number and the sum of the perfect divisors of the other number is equal to the first number, then the numbers are called Amicable Numbers. Yōko Ogawa ( 小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers. Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless--too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers--but I don't know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son's schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor's study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain. The Professor suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident 17 years ago in 1975 that left his memory in shreds. He is unable to remember anything new and his memory lasts precisely 80 minutes. Mercifully, he lives in the world of numbers and that remains intact. I cannot fathom what it must be like to wake up each day and have to start all over again to make sense of the environment. Ogawa tells us that "…he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort." He does not remember the housekeeper from one day to the next. However, they can always discuss one thing without worry – Mathematics.

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.Ogawa's charming fable presents a stark contrast to the creepy novellas collected last year in The Diving Pool, but her strength as an engaging writer remains.” —Vikas Turahkia , The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) A housekeeper, a single mother with a 10-year-old son, finds herself at the cottage of a 64-year-old Math professor who has had nine housekeepers before her. She expects a difficult client, but what she least expects is an affection that develops into a strong friendship. He shares his knowledge and tries to communicate with his two friends despite his memory failing him. A] mysterious, suspenseful, and radiant fable . . . The smart and resourceful housekeeper, the single mother of a baseball-crazy 10-year-old boy the Professor adores, falls under the spell of the beautiful mathematical phenomena the Professor elucidates, as will the reader, and the three create an indivisible formula for love.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist