Book Review - "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa

I don’t know where I heard about this book but it’s been sitting around on my Kindle for a while so I decided to give it a read.  The story pulled me right in from the start.   The characters are all so interesting and the story intriguing.  This is a quiet story…not a lot of action…it’s about human relationships.

A mathematics professor has been in a car accident and his short term memory only lasts for 80 minutes.  He does remember everything from his past….right up until the accident.  The professor is getting old, so the housekeeper is hired to clean and cook for him.  The Professor pins notes to his jacket to help him remember things.  He clips on a note that reminds him he has a housekeeper.  Every morning she has to re-introduce herself.  The housekeeper has a son that the Professor calls Root…because the housekeeper’s son has a square head and it reminds the professor of the square root sign.  As the days go on the Housekeeper and Root learn how to deal with the Professor’s 80 minute memory.  They treat him with respect and dignity.  The Professor loves numbers.  He was a mathematics professor before the accident and he is always ready to pass on his enthusiasm for numbers.  He is often giving a little lesson to the Housekeeper…and she begins to see beauty in numbers herself.  

Numbers.  I love numbers.  There’s beauty there, regularity, dependability.  Patterns; beautiful patterns.  I think that numbers point us to attributes of God.  This made me especially enjoy this lovely story that had a few little lessons about numbers tucked here and there.  But there is so much more to this beautiful story.  It’s about loyalty, respect, caring, giving of yourself and friendship.   Even if you don’t like numbers and mathematics class filled you with dread, you will appreciate this story very much…and maybe you will also begin to see the beauty in numbers yourself.

Some of my favorite quotes in the book:

“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material thing 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.”

“Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.”

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers.  For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied, and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world.”