I have been known to hurriedly read the final 40 pages of a novel 15 minutes before the start of my own book club gathering. It is not reading but skimming and, while preferable to turning up not knowing how it all ends, it is not the ideal way to read any book but perhaps least of all The Housekeeper and the Professor.
To rush it would be like attempting eight-second yoga. Part of the point of it is to relax, meditate and feel soothed. On the other hand, if you take it too seriously you might never finish it at all for the novel is, in part, about mathematics. I found myself thinking well, if the housekeeper is prepared to attempt to understand perfect numbers, then the least I can do is to try too.
The housekeeper is our narrator. She is sent to work for a professor who is covered with Post-it Notes who has been robbed of his memory by an accident. He can keep up to date for 80 minutes and then, as his sister-in-law explains, “it’s as if he has a single, 80-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records anything new he has to record over the existing memories”.
The notes tagged to his jacket are heart-breaking. They make the professor look mad, but he needs basic prompts to maintain the most basic of relationships. He is nervous of the outside world and most comfortable bent over his complicated equations. It should have been the most tiresome work ever undertaken by the housekeeper. However, the professor takes a shine to her young son, who he decides to call Root, and the three of them form a touching alliance. It is the professor who displays emotion and concern for Root, rather than his mother. In turn, the housekeeper gives the mathematician more affection than he has received for many years.
It is strange, too, that she pores over the puzzles shown to her by the professor, giving them more of herself than she gives her own child. Perhaps this says something about Japanese society. Certainly there is an overwhelming sense of containment and the only release comes in the form of the exultation felt when an equation is solved or a pattern of numbers understood.
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There are moments when you think the book is about to become a whodunnit or a romance, but the pace never wavers, the stillness remains and the plot never really thickens. This ought to be highly unsatisfying, but I was amazed to find that this was a novel that I cannot shake from my mind.
Next Friday; the verdict of Damian Whitworth
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