Review of 'The Housekeeper and the Professor'

'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa .

I read this short book and discovered the possibility of beauty of numbers. This mind needs to expand and soar high. One thing I realized after reading this book is the uniqueness of Japanese writers. I find their precision, their attention to details, and expression of subtle and understated emotions very appealing...so much is said in so few words...a delight...I find them shorn of the jadedness and anger I have come to associate with some American/Western European novels...Things are not shoved into your face...at the same time, it is not faux abstraction. There is a beauty of romance I find hard to associate in any of the current genre of writing from England or the US.

This book revolves around a professor of mathematics and his housekeeper. The Professor lost his short-term memory after an accident and cannot remember anything beyond 80 minutes. This short-term memory loss scenario has been explored in different places (including 'The memento' and 'Ghajini'). Further, he remembers things prior to his accident (before 1975) in great detail...especially the numbers.
What makes this story poignant is the love the Professor feels for numbers and manages to draw in a woman without a high school education for the same...I have sometimes thought of numbers in trivial ways...(e.g. how any number besides 0 (let's say X) added to 9 results in a two digit number and this 2 digit number always adds up to give the original number X....e.g. 9 + 4 = 13.....add up 1 and 3 and you get 4).
In this book, the Professor waxes poetically about numbers and he finds comfort in then...He loves prime numbers and states how difficult it is to find prime numbers as they keep growing larger.
Interestingly, this story also talks about fate indirectly...the Professor believes that something akin to a divine scheme brought the Housekeeper and him together because of their numbers...her birthday is Feb 20 (220) and his watch has an engraving of 284....these two numbers are called 'amicable numbers' and Fermat and Descartes were able to find only one each...They are amicable because the factors of each adds up to be equal to the other number!
and I loved this line by the Housekeeper..'my birthday and his watch had overcome great trials and tribulations to meet each other in the vast sea of numbers'.....fate? destiny?

The characters in this story are not named. The Housekeeper's son is named Root by the Professor because his hair look like a square root sign. The Housekeeper is an illegitimate daughter and her son is an illegitimate son. Their longing for a family is evident in their quick bonding with the Professor who forgets them every day and asks them the same questions repeatedly. His love for Root is all enveloping and seems to almost override the impact of memory loss. I adored his comparison of children with prime numbers...'He treated Root exactly as he treated primes...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'.

The Housekeeper, Root and the Professor enjoy baseball and talk about it...they visit a game too ...I did not find these discussions particularly illuminating...except that Enatsu, the great player's number was 28...which is a perfect number ...why?..because 28 = 1+2+4+7+14...the sum of divisors of 28 is 28.

Professor : Numbers existed long before world was formed...
Housekeeper: I always thought humans invented them
Professor: No...if that were the case, they won't be so difficult to understand...and there would be no need for mathematicians.

This was a remarkable conversation for me...I never thought of it...it makes perfect sense too..

A related discussion of the number zero (0)
Housekeeper: Wasn't there always a zero?
Professor: No, humans made the zero, through great pain and struggle. The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing...and since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible to express it. So someone had to express this reasonable assumption and figure out how to express nothing...A great Indian teacher of mathematics discovered the zero written in God's notebook...and thanks to him, we can read many more pages in the notebook....We can distinguish between 38 and 308..Despite what the Greeks thought, zero doesn't disturb the rules of calculation; on the contrary it brings greater order to them.

Again, what a revelation!...I was dumbfounded by the simplicity and the profoundness of mathematics here...As you will note, the Professor is spiritual...he acknowledges God's hand everywhere...talks about God's notebooks into which the mathematicians try to peer.

His pleasure at watching the Housekeeper cooking...the detailed description of the salad, egg and pork...and how it evokes a deep sense of satisfaction for the Housekeeper in a daily task overlooked by many and considered mundane....It is all in the details (my perception).

Some notable quotes from this book:

'A mathematician once said, '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.'
Maybe this held true for love too, the Housekeeper pondered..

'The truly correct proof is the one that strikes a balance between strength and flexibility.'...this might hold true for so many other things...what we humans wish to achieve..

'He believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.'

' A problem isn't finished just because you have found the right answer.'

I was never sure of an undercurrent of a romantic connection between the Housekeeper and the Professor as it is never directly alluded to by the Housekeeper (who is the narrator)...She is deeply attached to him and admits to feelings of jealousy once her role is usurped....the sister-in-law of the Professor is jealous of her closeness and she remarks cruelly, 'You see, my brother-in-law can never remember you and he can never forget me'....

Verdict: A simple story made exemplary by the beauty of numbers.
Recommended: Highly
Words which spring to my mind after reading this: moving, eye-opening, poetry and music of math.