 |
|
trade paper $13.00
Picador Usa
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
ALSO SEE
The Independent
More reviews by Todd Shimoda
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
Despite centuries of study, much of the human brain remains a mystery. Memory is particularly elusive. Where are memories stored? How do memories go from short-term memory to long-term? Some of what we do know comes from those who suffer unfortunate brain injuries or disease. In a classic case, Patient HM (Henry Molaison), had parts of his brain surgically removed to control severe epileptic seizures. After the surgery he suffered amnesia and could no longer form long-term memories. Based on the parts of his brain which were removed, researchers developed hypotheses about how memories are created.
In YOKO OGAWA's novel, a single mother is hired to care for a retired math professor with a brain injury due to an auto crash more than twenty years ago. Similar to HM, his injury allows him only to remember the past before the brain injury and what happened in the last eighty minutes. He forgets everything that happened immediately before the short time span. His sister-in-law, his only family remaining, lets him stay in a small cottage on her property. She hires a succession of housekeepers to take care of him. The stress of caring for an elderly man with his strange disability drives them away after a few weeks or months.
The professor tries to cope with his memory problems by writing notes and pinning them to his clothes: "You remember only the last 80 minutes." "You have a housekeeper who arrives in the morning." Despite the note, every morning when the housekeeper does arrive, he is meeting her for the first time. His first question to her is a numerical one: her shoe size, her birthday, her height. In each number he finds something of interest.
Indeed, numbers and math are his life. Still intact are his memory and mathematical knowledge and skills from before the accident. He spends most of days solving mathematical puzzles and proofs, submitting them to journals and often winning prizes. Of course he can't remember the ones he submitted and would have to start over given the same problem. At first only politely seeming interested in his mathematics, the housekeeper actually begins to work through some simple math exercises with him such as finding amicable numbers (equal sums of factors, e.g. 220 and 284), and perfect numbers (sum of divisors equal the number, e.g. 28). She begins to see the beauty in the regularities and mysteries of numbers.
When she feels comfortable, she brings her son, aged 10, to the cottage. The professor takes to him instantly, calling him Root because the boy's odd haircut reminds the professor of the square root sign. The two also find out they have baseball as a common interest. Of course the professor is only familiar with the mathematics and statistics of the game and his knowledge stopped with players long ago retired.
Together, the housekeeper, professor, and the son have adventures and misadventures, some funny, some tragic. We learn about the professor's past life and more about his condition. Sweetly captivating, the novel leans toward the sentimental but not enough to spoil a good read.
Todd Shimoda
09/08/2009
| |
|
