The Housekeeper and The Professor review

[alobear]

The Housekeeper and The Professor is a short novel by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa, which I picked up on my last random trip to Borders.  It's taken me a while to get round to it, but it turned out to be excellent.  It's narrated by the housekeeper of an ageing maths professor who's short term memory only last eighty minutes.  It's more of a portrait of a group of characters than a proper story, since not a great deal actually happens, but it's beautifully written and very poignant.  It's quite sad, but not depressing, and the characters are incredibly engaging, despite the fact that they aren't given names.  There's quite a lot of maths in it, some of which was a bit beyond me, but the intricacies of the equations are only important in terms of their innate beauty and their importance to the professor as the one constant in his life, so it's not necessary to be a maths whizz to appreciate the book.