The Housekeeper and the Professor

I have now tried three times to upload the pretty blue cover of this book and have decided that the 'three strikes and you're out' rule applies to this blog. I finished The Housekeeper and the Professor two days ago, ahead of the weekly schedule, and I think that technology shouldn't slow down my posting.

I discovered this title while reading the Indie Fall/Winter flyer. I can spend a lot of time reading over the titles and the recommendations written in these flyers. Each title is reviewed by an independent bookseller, their bookstore named below their recommendation. Sometimes the names of the stores are almost as fun to learn about as the books. As someone who dreams of having her own bookstore one day, I am always on the look out for a great name...

The Housekeeper and the Professor caught my eye immediately as the professor suffers from brain injury. I spent two years working as a speech pathologist with brain injured patients and found the work beyond fascinating. The twist in this story is that the professor suffered an injury that leaves him with functioning memory of the time before the car accident but only eighty minutes of memory for all after the accident. To compensate, this brilliant mathematician pins notes to his rumpled suits to remind him of important information.

Throughout the book, the professor teaches the housekeeper and her son about prime numbers, amicable numbers and the function of the elliptical curve. As a person who has always disliked math, even I became intrigued through the professor's teaching. I came to wish this man had sat across from me in seventh grade math. Had he, I might have gone down a very different road. A born teacher, the professor "seemed convinced that children's questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers."

Yoko Ogawa's writing is translated from Japanese which at times effects the flow of the story. For the most part though, the writing is almost poetic despite the mathematical subject matter. We learn through this story much about not only math but humanity. We learn that perhaps math is truth in just the same way that love is truth.

The following is what I took away from this powerful book:

"The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world. Life isn't going to be any easier, nor is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers. Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem...But those things aren't the goal of mathematics. The only goal is to discover the truth."