In 'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa, an astute mathematician with a mysterious past is confined to a life of memory fragments due to a traumatic head injury. He finds an unlikely companion in a young housekeeper assigned to care for him, whose expertise in numbers and warmth slowly unlocks the professor's heart. As they navigate the intricate beauty of mathematics, a profound friendship unfolds, revealing the hidden patterns of life and love. With each equation and theorem shared, they discover the interconnectedness of their worlds. This touching narrative poses an intriguing question: how can the language of numbers bridge the gaps in human connection?
By Yoko Ogawa
Published: 2009
""Mathematics is the poetry of logical ideas.""
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 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. 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.
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“"Mathematics is the poetry of logical ideas."”
The Housekeeper and the Professor
By Yoko Ogawa
Discover a world of knowledge through our extensive collection of book summaries.
Yoko Ogawa is a renowned Japanese author known for her compelling and psychologically rich narratives. Her notable works include "The Housekeeper and the Professor," which explores the relationship between a brilliant mathematician and his housekeeper, and "The Memory Police," a dystopian novel addressing themes of memory and loss. Ogawa's writing style is characterized by its lyrical prose, deep emotional resonance, and intricate character development, often intertwining elements of suspense and melancholy.
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