Prime Numbers, Intellectual Posturing, and Baseball

Title: The Housekeeper and the Professor
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Host: Gail

We took a highway whose number starts with a prime number (followed by two numbers that have prime numbers as square roots: 394--think about it!) to get to Gail’s welcoming living room where, surrounded by books, we discussed The Housekeeper and the Professor.

Because of the special nature of this book (exploring the delights of a mind that focuses everything through the lens of mathematics) we reminded ourselves that no matter how passionate we feel, we don’t start out “I loved this . . .” or “I hated this.” We also recognized that, had been the title of a book written by an American, it most likely wouldn’t have the theme of mathematics. And some thought the story hinted at more romance than just the love of mathematics.

Insights and Opinions

+ Steve opened the discussion by likening the book to musical theater. “In a musical, the story is constructed to support the songs. Here, the ‘songs’ are lectures about mathematics.” -- a delightful observation, since many of us started the book thinking that we don’t like math, and what are we doing here?

+As we got into it, we found ourselves mulling versions of “why does the world exist? Is it true that math predates human existence? Is this a philosophy of existence? Did humans have to create math or was it already there? Isn’t this the whole platonic ideal?” All of this emerged after the professor introduced the concept of ”zero” as a state of being. (p. 120)

+ Like the Housekeeper, we had to wonder “why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers.”

+ Linda observed that this work felt a lot like The Anthologist, except there we learned a lot about poetry; here we learned a lot about math. She would have loved the book if it were about a poet searching for the perfect word.

+ This book, with its intellectual posturing, reminded Blanche and others of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

+ Whether we like math or not, the book employed a wonderfully imaginative construct, with mind-tickling details such as the maintenance of hand-written notes all over the professor’s suits to help him since each day starts as a blank, with memory that lasts 80 minutes, and the sub-theme of baseball (some people love the game, others love the statistics. )

+ Still, the plot felt “painfully thin” with a number of missing pieces; when the 80 minutes started feeling limited, we wanted it to go somewhere. Readers who didn’t have time to think through the math found it less engaging. We wondered why the sister-in-law turned over the care of the Professor to a series of housekeepers. Several readers felt we missed a sense of the world in which these characters lived, but Chris--who surprised and delighted us by her appearance--who had lived in Japan, said it is such a controlled society, and she thought it felt true to the country she experienced.

+ While several of us would recommend this book to friends “with a warning,” Gail summed it up best by observing it’s a book you can read on many levels.  And, someone said it is the kind of book that encourages a reader to “stay young, stay inquisitive, don’t limit yourself.”