The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa

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.

Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award.

Coffee And Books Book Club

Hobbies & Passions

Book Club

Fiction

Reading

Coffee and Tea Socials

Northern New Jersey

Novel Reading

Local Activities

Make New Friends

Weekend Adventures

Thought-Provoking Conversations

Personal Development

Enjoying Life

Exploring New Restaurants

Hobbies

Passion

BOOK CLUB location texted; see below for title and author

This content is available only to members

Share this event

BOOK CLUB location texted; see below for title and author

Details