The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper and the ProfessorYoko 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. 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

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.

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 02/03/2009
ISBN: 9780312427801
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.28h x 6.32w x 0.53d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 11/17/2008 pg. 40
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2008 pg. 1224
Booklist 01/01/2009 pg. 46
New Yorker (The) 02/09/2009 pg. 109
New York Times Book Review 03/01/2009 pg. 9
New York Times Book Review 03/08/2009 pg. 18
Library Journal 04/01/2009 pg. 71
Science 06/05/2009 pg. 1271
Shelf Awareness 01/01/0001