This was one of those books that I don’t really get, but it redeemed itself by being all about math. :) Yay, math!
The unnamed housekeeper of the title tells the story of how she came to work for the unnamed professor, who is an older man who has only 80 minutes of memory for anything that happened after an accident several years previous. The professor, a mathematician, can still play with his numbers, so every time he “meets” the housekeeper he asks for her shoe size and birthday and various other numerical things and finds interesting connections between those numbers and others. The housekeeper and her son (whom the professor nicknames Root for his flat head [like the square root symbol]) become friends with the professor, even if the professor doesn’t realize it.
That’s really the whole story; there’s not much in the way of plot but it is a very interesting character study of a man with little short-term memory and how people around him react to him. The housekeeper at first finds him a little off-putting, but soon learns to like him and even math because a) he’s a great teacher and b) he can’t get exasperated with you for taking a long time to learn something. And the professors cares very much for Root, as a ten-year-old boy, even though he can’t remember him in particular.
And there’s math, and you can’t go wrong with that! :)
Rating: 7/10
(Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Japan, Countdown Challenge: 2009)
See also:
BookEnds
an adventure in reading
Thoughts of Joy
Pass me yours, if you’ve got ’em.
