REVIEW: The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa

• Year first released:  2003 (Japanese), 2009 (English)
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780312427801
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Picador
• My rating (out of 5):  5

I'm sure you've heard it said before - or perhaps even said it yourself - that "either you're good at English, or you're good at math." I've never felt this way - I've always enjoyed both quite a bit. In fact, in those rare occasions when I come across a combination of the two - say, a novel which uses mathematics as an important motif - chances are quite decent that I'm going to be spellbound by the book.

This was certainly the case with PopCo by Scarlett Thomas, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Momo by Michael Ende.

This is also exactly what happened with The Housekeeper and the Professor. With it, Ogawa creates what is easily one of the most charming novels I've come across (in a very long time, if not ever), using a simple story peppered with complicated (but well-explained) mathematics, to show us the relationship between the two nameless main characters: an elderly, retired professor of mathematics who suffers from a unique form of dementia, and his newest housekeeper.

The professor's dementia plays a key role in how the plot and the characters develop. After a traumatic car accident over thirty years ago, he can no longer create new memories. Instead, every eighty minutes his short-term memory "resets," so to speak. (You might be reminded of the movie 50 First Dates. Yes, Housekeeper employs a similar trope, but in a significantly more mature, wonderful manner.)

To the professor, everything is mathematical. Upon first meeting his new housekeeper, one of the first questions he asks is her shoe size. Later it's her birthday. Another time it's her height at birth. And all of these, he twists into formulas, explains to her why the numbers are each elegant in their own way, and how everything in life connects more than we realize.

It's a word that Ogawa uses often all throughout the book - "elegant" - which is a perfect description of mathematics, and a perfect description of the book. There's a thread of beauty which courses all throughout the book, whether it's in the professor's mathematical explanations, his metaphors, even the way the narrator (the housekeeper) weaves in and out of chronology to tell her story.

Housekeeper pulses with a profound sense of wonder, but perhaps the most miraculous element of all is that this wonder never dips into the surreal or the otherworldly. Ogawa shows the beauty in coincidence, in numbers, in baseball games and birthday parties and post-it notes. Much like I said in my review of Good Morning, Midnight almost a year ago, Housekeeper doesn't trouble itself with focusing on the negative side of reality. Though of course the book has its tension and conflicts, it is more about the wonder, the beauty, the positivity - without ever overstepping its bounds, sugar-coating its hardships, or dipping its toes into the too-good-to-be-true. It is, instead, a real, earthy novel which knows what it wants to tell us, and tells us in the most graceful way possible.

Throughout the book, we realize that the professor is exactly right: everything in life is mathematical - we just aren't as consistently, acutely aware of it as is the professor. And, if everything is mathematical, then by extension, everything is full of beauty and wonder as well.

Elegant, indeed.

REVIEW: Foundation - Isaac Asimov

• Year first released:  1951
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780380009145 (Mine is a particularly old edition. You can get the more current, "common" edition here.)
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Avon
• My rating (out of 5):  4

I know I'm late to the ball game on this one. Now sixty-seven years old, Foundation has been one of the most highly-regarded novels in all of science fiction. Better late than never, I suppose.

It's a bit of a stretch to call Foundation a novel, though. It is actually a series of five novellas, placed in chronological order, each of which takes place at least thirty years after the previous. Character names and points in the universe's history are referenced as the novellas progress, but they don't, per se, tell one cohesive plot. They are, rather, fragments from the history of the decline of the Galactic Empire, snapshots of events which ultimately add up to the empire's fall.

Though I have nothing against this sort of arrangement, there is a bit of a problem built in to it by default: each of the five stories is quite compelling, but needlessly brief. Overall, Foundation almost reads like an encyclopedia with only five entries. Sure, each novellas has a plot, characters, twists, etc., but all of these things are merely used to illustrate the encyclopedia-like entries, each of which effectively says, "Here are the events and key players around this moment in time, which play a part in the inevitable decline of the Galactic Empire." (A decline, by the way, which is not fully realized by the end of the book - not really a spoiler, so don't be concerned.)

That said, now that I've finished reading the book, I'm left feeling as though I haven't even scratched the surface of Foundation's universe. The characters stay only long enough to amplify their place in the historical timeline. There is virtually no backstory to any of the places, technologies, cultures, or ideals that come together to create the Galactic Empire, and precious little of these elements to indicate the empire's unavoidable decline. Foundation gives us these fragments, and very little else. In this way, we might even say that it reads like a scripture.

All of that sounds like a complaint, I'm sure, but I'm not certain if it actually is.

It's true that the fragmentary nature of the book as a whole left me feeling incomplete. The reason I felt this way, though, is because I knew there must be so much more to the story. And though I wish on the one hand that Asimov gave us this "more;" on the other hand, it says something profound about the writing and the universe-building that I can have such a longing for all of the missing pieces.*

This approach actually gives the story much more credibility than a book which seems as though it was built from the ground up. Foundation feels as though it was, instead, simply pulled out of a much larger, greater story that was already out there, waiting to be told, like Asimov is simply the one who happened to notice it and write it down for us. Certainly this is a powerful way to craft a story, one which is quite rare in literature.

Overall, the complaint is its own antidote, I think. Do I wish there was more backstory and development? Partially, yes. I was especially fond of the first of the five novellas - The Psychohistorians - and would love to read an entire novel based solely on that epoch of the Empire's history. And the wit of Salvor Hardin (the main character of the third novella, The Mayors) was so enjoyable that I'd like to read more of his antics.

Then again, Michael Angelo once said, "Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” Sometimes the longing is better than the completion. Sometimes knowing that there's more to be known is more profound than knowing everything. Foundation is a great example of this ideal.




(*Of course Foundation is only the first in a series. And though some parts of this nebulous "more" are bound to appear in other volumes, I believe that the point still stands - particularly if the other entries are told in the same fragmentary, encyclopedic fashion.)