An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him.
Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him.
Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
Yoko Ogawa (Author)
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction
has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her
works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor,
Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police,
was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at
Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.
He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu,
among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino's Out was a finalist
for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his
translation of Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man
Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?
Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching.
*Paul Auster*
A perfectly sustained novel (a tribute to Stephen Snyder's smooth
translation); like a note prolonged...a pause enabling us to peer
intently into the lives of its characters...has all the charm and
restraint of any by Ishiguro and the whimsy of Murakami
*Los Angeles Times*
Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell. Never
before has the beauty of maths been so lovingly explored...a
tender, gentle book...Ogawa is an original and establishes a world
in a paragraph..This is a tale which will leave the reader
gasping...Hopefully more of her exciting, thoughtful fiction is
heading our way.
*Irish Times*
Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous
concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a
satisfyingly textured foundation
*Guardian*
Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, this novel has
the pared-down elegance of an equation
*Oprah magazine*
Ogawa's crystalline prose heightens the simple elegance of this
tale of lost souls looking for comfort and shelter - and finding it
in the timeless symmetry of mathematical equations.
*Metro*
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