The Housekeeper and the Professor

This book was one of the three books I purchased from the Book Depository right before they were closed for good. :( So, we can say that it has a special place in my heart. I remember ordering from them years and years ago as they always had a no shipping fee policy so buying books written in English through them instead of the physical shops in Turkey has always been a cheaper and more convenient option. Rip the best online bookstore. Anyway, let’s talk a little bit about the book itself.

Conveniently, the book’s main characters are the ones in the title themselves. The professor has a peculiar condition, some sort of amnesia, where he doesn’t remember anything that happened after 1975. Correction: he remembers some stuff but only for an 80-minute window. I can’t say I have heard such a machine-like amnesia before, but I guess we’ll have to run with it. Another major character trait is that he was a maths professor and is quite literally obsessed with maths. As his memory only lasts for 80 minutes, everyone he sees is always a new person for him and one constant is that he always asks a question that’ll have a numerical answer to these “new” faces and makes a mathematical remark as a reaction. To me, this sounds interesting up until like the 10^th time I see this old guy. However, luckily, the Housekeeper doesn’t share the same impatience as me. Oh, and he also has a bunch of post-it notes attached to his clothes to remember some key information. They don’t help that much but they’re always there.

When the Housekeeper starts working for the Professor, she sees herself as someone who has always had a passion for cleaning and organisation and had barely any other interests. When the professor starts to hit her with all these mathematical comebacks, she starts to develop an interest and despite knowing the professor won’t even remember who she is the next day let alone which mathematical concept he talked about, she goes home every day, studying these concepts the professor mentioned that day, hoping she’ll be able to impress him the next day. After a point, the professor finds out that she has a young son who stays home alone until she comes back from work which doesn’t really sit right with him and tells her to bring her son to his house while she works. As a result, both the mother and the son start to develop a friendship with the old guy and we, as the readers, get to witness this friendship.

This was both a lovely and a slightly uncomfortable book to read for me. Because of his condition, the professor doesn’t have any friends, and no one really bothers to keep him company as they all know they will be forgotten about in exactly 80 minutes. What seems as a barrier to many isn’t really a barrier at all to the Housekeeper and her son. It is quite lovely to see how they start to care about the old guy and build this unusual friendship. I won’t lie, for such a short book, I got quite bored reading about the bits about baseball and easily got distracted.

The reason why I ordered this book in the first place was my interest in maths. Maths has been my favourite subject all throughout my education for years and years. The concepts mentioned in the book were interesting and the Professor’s ability to notice patterns in numbers was impressive. I’m not sure how I would’ve improved the language but after probably the third mention of a maths concept, the way they were mentioned started to feel a little tiring to read. But these are not what made the book a little uncomfortable to read for me. It was the way the Housekeeper became kind of obsessed with the Professor. I’m not sure if it’s just me but the way she talked about him or the fact that she went through his stuff made me wonder if she was ever going to make a move on the next page, which never happened but the language constantly hinted that at me. So maybe it’s just my dirty mind making this an uncomfortable read but I would’ve appreciated a more friendly tone rather than an obsessive one.

I am starting to notice that I don’t like any of the books I read??? Maybe I was just born to criticise everything and see their flaws more than the good bits but oh well. Not much I can do about it. It was overall an easy read and probably a good one to pick up if you’re in a reading slump especially if you don’t mind the baseball bits. One of the reviews on Goodreads start with “I finished the novel two weeks ago and it already started to fade from my memory.” And I couldn’t agree more. While being a lovely story, it wasn’t the most memorable. I still like the plot, just not a big fan of the execution.