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.I'm on bedrest and needed a positive book. This book is the perfect balance of positivity and real life. I couldn't put it down and needed to know what would happen to all of the characters.
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Yoko Ogawa's quiet and insightful story, The Housekeeper and The Professor surprised me in several ways. For starters, I found myself transfixed by a story that relies heavily on two things I normally can't stand: math and baseball. These two subjects serve as metaphors in Ogawa's touching story about a young housekeeper, her memory-impaired professor client, and her 10-year-old son. Far from being cheap literary devices,...
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This is an incredibly beautiful story of a housekeeper with a kind heart who recognizes the endearing and unique qualities of a professor, unappreciated and unwanted by many others due to a mental limitation, a memory of only 80 minutes. Through her patient and generous nature, the professor touches and enriches her life, and her son's, in a charming way, opening her eyes to discover beauty she never knew existed. I absolutely...
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"The Housekeeper and the Professor" is a remarkable book, by the Japanese author Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder. It tells the story of an intelligent, if uneducated young woman, a single mother working as a housekeeper to support herself and her ten year old son. She is sent to work for a man known to us only as the Professor (as she is known to us only as the housekeeper; and her son, only as Root, a nickname...
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Yoko Ogawa has created a simple yet powerful story in The Housekeeper and the Professor. Nothing about the book is elaborate. This is a novel without extraneous characters, plot twists, or grandiose prose. A mathematics professor loses his short term memory in a car accident and can't remember anything for more than 80 minutes. Despite this impediment, his housekeeper and her son become deeply attached to the man, and...
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