The Housekeeper and The Professor
This book has been a major success in Japan and finds in the elegant storytelling its finest point. The story is simple, it's about the relationship between a math professor and his housekeeper (and her 10 years old son) told by a narrator who is the housekeeper herself. The widow of the professor's brother appears too. That's all basically and no, they do not have names.
It's a book made of touching moments, of gestures and interactions between radically different people as told by one of them. The author is able to tell you all about them through the eyes and mind of the housekeeper, telling you without patronizing about different social status (as you could imagine if this was a sermon-prone book) any single moment. It's about human relationship, no matter who you are, a clever professor with some 'issues', a child, a housekeeper or the widow.
My wife loves this book very much for the 'poetic' way the story is told. Tomorrow I will tell you about the movie that came out of it.
The housekeeper, just another one of a long series in the house of this complex man, is at first puzzled, then annoyed... and then, then a friendship starts with the arrival in the house of the 10 years old boy, the son of the housekeeper. Despite memory loss, the professor establishes a relationship with the child and talks to him about the beauty of numbers and maths; so life goes on. Till the health deteriorate and things come to an end.
It's a beautiful book for the kindness the author is able to transmit to the reader, the feelings of the people involved, a simple woman, a complex professor and a 10 years old kid.
Enjoy it,Yoko Ogawa is a great unique author and the translation is as delicate as the original probably is.
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