The Housekeeper and the Professor
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...
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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. 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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780312427801 (0312427808)
ASIN: 312427808
Publish date: February 3rd 2009
Publisher: Picador
Pages no: 180
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Science,
Literary Fiction,
Adult,
Contemporary,
Asian Literature,
Asia,
Japan,
Japanese Literature,
Mathematics
The Professor, a brilliant mathematician (who is unnamed), only has eighty minutes of short term memory, due to a traumatic head injury. The Housekeeper assigned to the Professor (also unnamed), is young, astute, and has a ten year old son (nicknamed Root). Each morning, as the Professor and Ho...
The story of The Housekeeper and the Professor is that of the two characters already mentioned in the title plus the housekeeper’s ten-year-old son and the poetry of mathematics. It begins in March 1992 when the narrator takes up her job as the professor’s housekeeper in a shabby back yard garden ...
The story of The Housekeeper and the Professor is that of the two characters already mentioned in the title plus the housekeeper’s ten-year-old son and the poetry of mathematics. It begins in March 1992 when the narrator takes up her job as the professor’s housekeeper in a shabby back yard garden ...
The housekeeper and the professor is a simple, slice of life story written by Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The book details the strange relationship between a professor who has a strange memory problem, a housekeeper and her young son. The story is well crafted, poignant and short. The book is barely...
A beautiful story that is at once simple yet deep and thought provoking. The translation amazes me, honestly. Many times I've read a Japanese-to-English novel translation that felt stilted, empty of prose, with remnants of Japanese sentence structure awkwardly lurking in the passages. This book is t...