In treating one another with such warm concern and respect, the characters implicitly tell us something about the unforgiving society on the other side of the professor's cottage door. “This sweetly melancholy novel adheres to the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in what is off-center, imperfect. “Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, The Housekeeper and the Professor has the pared-down elegance of an equation.” - O, The Oprah Magazine and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen.” -Dennis Overbye, The New York Times Book Review But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don't see until you are in them. This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. The three lives connect like the vertices of a triangle.” -Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburo Oe and the whimsy of Murakami. like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a perfectly sustained novel. 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. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. 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. She is an astute young Housekeeper-with a ten-year-old son-who is hired to care for the Professor.Īnd every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. 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. 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.

La formula del professore by Yōko Ogawa