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elementarymydear 's review for:
The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yōko Ogawa
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
“A problem isn’t finished just because you’ve found the right answer.”
I picked up this book last night with the intention of reading a couple of chapters before I went to bed, and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. From the first page I fell in love with the characters and the tender friendship between them that grows so wonderfully across the book.
Read this and other reviews on my blog!
We read from the perspective of a young woman, a single mother in her late twenties, who is newly employed as a housekeeper to an aging professor of mathematics. She is his tenth housekeeper; following a car accident his memory only lasts for eighty minutes. Every morning he has forgotten her, and refers to the scribbled notes he has clipped to his suit.
After a while, on the professor’s insistence, her son joins them after he has finished school. The professor nicknames him ‘Root’, due to his flat head (just like a square root), and so that is the name that sticks.
It would be useless for me to try and describe the relationship between the housekeeper, the professor, and Root, when you could (and should) read the book yourself and get a much better idea than I can clumsily summarise in a paragraph. Their friendship is unique and true, but not without betrayals, arguments and disagreements. There is a fourth character as well – the widow – whose absence through most of the book begins as one kind of tragedy and ends in another.
For the professor, whose life is a daily cycle of unknowing and uncertainty, mathematics holds the beauty and constancy of the universe. His obsession and admiration of numbers is infectious, and soon spreads to both the housekeeper and Root. I will admit that the maths geek in me got very excited when Euler’s identity appeared! The professor has a way of describing numbers, as if they as much living and breathing characters as they are constants, that you couldn’t help but be drawn in by.
This is an absolute gem of a novel, and if you’re looking for something gentle, gripping, and moving in the best way, I would highly recommend it!
I picked up this book last night with the intention of reading a couple of chapters before I went to bed, and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. From the first page I fell in love with the characters and the tender friendship between them that grows so wonderfully across the book.
Read this and other reviews on my blog!
We read from the perspective of a young woman, a single mother in her late twenties, who is newly employed as a housekeeper to an aging professor of mathematics. She is his tenth housekeeper; following a car accident his memory only lasts for eighty minutes. Every morning he has forgotten her, and refers to the scribbled notes he has clipped to his suit.
After a while, on the professor’s insistence, her son joins them after he has finished school. The professor nicknames him ‘Root’, due to his flat head (just like a square root), and so that is the name that sticks.
It would be useless for me to try and describe the relationship between the housekeeper, the professor, and Root, when you could (and should) read the book yourself and get a much better idea than I can clumsily summarise in a paragraph. Their friendship is unique and true, but not without betrayals, arguments and disagreements. There is a fourth character as well – the widow – whose absence through most of the book begins as one kind of tragedy and ends in another.
For the professor, whose life is a daily cycle of unknowing and uncertainty, mathematics holds the beauty and constancy of the universe. His obsession and admiration of numbers is infectious, and soon spreads to both the housekeeper and Root. I will admit that the maths geek in me got very excited when Euler’s identity appeared! The professor has a way of describing numbers, as if they as much living and breathing characters as they are constants, that you couldn’t help but be drawn in by.
This is an absolute gem of a novel, and if you’re looking for something gentle, gripping, and moving in the best way, I would highly recommend it!