The Gift of Numbers: A Novel [Paperback]

Most of life's pleasures bear the brand "ephemeral" and for the main character of the Professor in Yoko Ogawa's novel, "The Housekeeper and the Professor" (published also as "The Gift of Numbers" and adapted to film under the name "The Professor's Beloved Equation (Formula)) this simple fact could not be truer or more laced with bittersweet irony.

A one-time instructor in mathematics, the professor lives under the watchful albeit somewhat distant eye of his sister-in-law, the only person from the present still retained within the realm of his older memory and not forgotten after a period consisting of a scant eighty minutes. Ogawa, modeling her protagonist after another short-term memory victim, insurance fraud investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in the 2000 film "Memento", allows her professor recall to elusive memory through scraps of paper covered with relevant tidbits of information pinned to his jacket rather than the almost grotesque prison-club tattooing that Shelby employed to remind himself of what occurred prior to the rollover of his critical time span. With her exquisite minimalist prose, Ogawa conveys the sad despair of loneliness and the sweetness of selflessness while using the magic of numbers to define the universal need to belong and be a part of someone else's life.

However disabled the professor's life may seem, he still maintains an extraordinary quality of well-being through his love and understanding of what for him embodies the ultimate truth. In weighing the unquestionable paradox of simplicity and complexity that formulates the absolute beauty of mathematics, the professor manages to inadvertently spark the lives of the single mother housekeeper who is hired to care for him and that of Root, her young ten-year-old son with insight into an abstract world that they never imagined. Even within the confines of this eighty-minute long statute of limitations, the bond achieved by the trio is forged by their ability to share and remember mathematical experiences that perpetrate ah-ha moments of understanding with regard to the absolute. This insight links the threesome together more cohesively and with seemingly greater sticking power than any of the usual day-to-day goings-on experienced by commonplace families. The ensuing creation of a lasting intimate connection transcends the many difficulties encountered as a result of the professor's disability, his sister-in-law's vigilance and Root's desire to penetrate the darkness that prevents the professor from tabulating the loving moments proffered by him and his mother and produces a formula for happiness that is as nearly perfect as the most elegant equation exacting the music of the spheres and fabric of the cosmos.

Bottom line: In "The Housekeeper and the Professor," Yoko Ogawa writes a small masterpiece that encompasses all the profundity of the perfect haiku. Fold upon fold, she fashions her flawless origami precisely in small vignettes that viewed as a whole exudes a fullness of feeling that not only proclaims the sum to be greater than its parts but reveals the ensuing fabrication to be something intangibly beautiful that is undeniably clean and distinctive as a Japanese woodcut. Recommended.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

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