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The Housekeeper and the Professor

By Yoko Ogawa

Published 2009

Read Feb 2018

It is highly likely that this is the only book this reader has read that was reviewed by a professor of mathematics and that the review was published in a peer-reviewed mathematics journal (Notices of the AMS, Volume 57, number 5 May 2010 pages 635-636). 

Why would a mathematics professor review a book of fiction that was a best-selling novel in Japan before being translated into English and also made into a Japanese film, TV show, a radio show, and a comic book?  The reason is that the main character is a former professor of mathematics who suffered a traumatic brain injury leaving him with an inability to remember anything that has happened longer ago that about 80 minutes and the title’s housekeeper title develops a certain kind of love of numbers through the characters’ association. 

This injury means he had to leave teaching and research and that his current life is fraught with difficulties.  Post-it notes pinned to his clothes help him remind him of essential information.  He lives in a small house on the property of his sister-in-law with whom he has limited interaction.  The sister-in-law hires a housekeeper to come to the professor’s house to clean and cook for him.  The housekeeper has her own life challenges as she is a single (never married) mother with a son of ten.  

The professor’s field of research was number theory and he remains fascinated with numbers and likely relates to them better than with others, especially now that he lives a very solitary life.  Each day the professor and the housekeeper go through a ritual.  He identifies her with a post-it on his clothes but since he doesn’t really remember her, he needs to relearn various numbers about her including shoe size, her age, etc. 

Over time he learns that she has a son to whom she returns only after he has finished his evening meal and she has cleaned up the kitchen.  He insists the boy come to the house after school instead.  The story describes the building of this trio’s relationship which includes the housekeeper and the boy discovering interest in numbers as well.  The other interest they share is baseball.  The professor’s favorite team is the Tigers, which is local, and his favorite player is Enatsu, an actual pitcher for the real Tigers team.  However, he retired in 1984, after the professor’s accident, but 17 years in the past.  The housekeeper and her son take the professor to a baseball game and try hard to keep the retirement of Enatsu a secret so he won’t be disappointed.

Reading the Japanese professor’s review in the math journal was very interesting for this reader.  He could comment on the cultural aspects (the unusualness of both hiring a housekeeper and single motherhood), the believability of the professor and especially his focus on numbers (not typical but not without precedent in this reviewer’s life), and the story of Enatsu.  In addition, this review provided the information at the beginning of this essay regarding the popularity of the book and the various media formats into which it has been adapted.  The reviewer also indicated that the translation into English is good.

This reader very much enjoyed the discussions of numbers and various math theories.  However, it isn’t necessary to know anything about math to enjoy this book.  As the math professor indicates in his review, there is little drama in the book.  However, there often isn’t substantial drama in the lives of many who live rich lives.  The focus of the novel is on the relationship that develops between the professor, the housekeeper, and her son and later includes discussion of the relationship between the professor and his sister-in-law.  

This reader highly recommends this short (192 pages) book that provides a quiet look at the impact unexpected relationships can have on people’s lives. 

Long Bright River

By Liz Moore

Published 2020

Read June 2020

Moore opens this book with a chapter called “List” which is simply that—a list of 52 people that ends with ”Our father. Our mother.”  The reader figures out quickly this is a list of people who have died of an overdose of an opioid—synthetic or heroin—and that many of the names in the list are very familiar to (or are family of) the narrator.   This chapter is nearly identically repeated as the next to last chapter.  In between are chapters titled “Then” and “Now”.   This rather long (492pages) book needs, or at least takes, a lot of pages to cover both the police procedural story that’s in the present and the family story that wraps around the characters and provides context for the present.  

As the “Now” opens, cop Mickey has found a dead woman while on duty and is relieved it’s not her sister Kacey who she hasn’t seen for a few months.  Kacey is an addict in the neighborhood in which the girls grew up and which Mickey currently patrols.  Like many others in the neighborhood, Kacey lives in various abandoned buildings in the area and supports her habit through prostitution.   Mickey isn’t happy that the death of this unidentified woman isn’t being investigated with vigor.  Over time, additional women are found dead and it’s clear a serial killer is in operating in the area. 

The “Then” entries amplify the girls’ diverging stories.  Mickey Fitzgerald and Kacey are two sisters who grew up in the Kennsington neighborhood of Philadelphia  with their grandmother, Gee,  after their mother dies of an overdose and their father has disappeared, presumably also dead (the opening “list” includes “our father”).    Mickey is the older sister and was generally introverted in high school. Although she showed promise for college education, Gee wouldn’t support application for financial aid and strongly discouraged Mickey from attending to avoid the realization that she wasn’t one of “them”, those in economic strata above theirs.   Mickey’s mentor in a community police program suggested law enforcement for a job/career.  She follows this guidance and becomes a beat cop in the Kennsington neighborhood, although her earnings allow her to move into a better area.  Younger sister Kacey was more outgoing which morphs into “wild”. She gets into drugs early, starts heroin by age 16, is kicked out of the house by Gee shortly thereafter and essentially begins a life on the streets.     Mickey chooses to stay in the Kennington assignment, in part, to be able to keep a watch on Kacey.

Moore uses her research of this real area to paint a rather dark picture of life of many in the neighborhood – living in various abandoned buildings in the once prosperous industrial area, trying to get clean but regularly failing, trying to manage their habit with various forms of opiates at various prices, turning tricks to get their fixes, trying to look out for each other but being limited in their capacity to do so when the next fix becomes mandatory. 

Mickey has avoided this life but is surrounded by it daily and her life is far from easy. She is a single mother.   Her job had allowed her to buy a small house she cherished but sold to move into a small apartment when her son’s father cut off child support which paid for his good preschool and daycare situation.  She seems to have few, if any, friends.   She engages her previous police partner, currently on medical disability, to help her with her off-the-books investigation, but the relationship is strained.  She is hiding her son from his delinquent father.  She has limited relationship with her family.  In a “Then” section, she attends Thanksgiving at a cousin’s for the first time in many years, without prior announcement, and is more tolerated than welcomed.  She’s being investigated at work for being away from the job several times without explanation (she was doing her own personal investigation of Kacey and the serial killer).  She’s not connecting well with her boss.  Her babysitter is unreliable.  Her hours are increasingly irregular as she pursues looking for Kacey.  Nothing is going very well for her.  But her situation is clearly better than Kacey’s.

The structure and style of the book kept this reader involved in this dark drama.  There are a number of plot twists that keep the reader a little off-balance which maintains the engagement.  Moore handles action well.  Simultaneously Moore has the reader considering this complex family and trying, like Mickey, to understand why the sisters’ paths are so divergent.  Mickey reminds Kacey that they had essentially the same childhood as their age difference is only two years—what led to the different choices they made?   Moore doesn’t supply the answer for these sisters or for others in their situation.   While the main mysteries are resolved, the ending leaves all of the characters in very uncertain but very real situations which keep the book firmly rooted in reality.  Job well done, Liz Moore. 

Elegy for April

By Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Published 2010

Read June 2020

This reader found a hard copy of Elegy for April in a Little Library on a road along a lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.  This reader was unaware that Benjamin Black is the pen name Booker Prize winner and Dubliner John Banville has used to write crime novels featuring a Dublin pathologist named Quirke.  Apparently Banville considers what he does as Black “a craft” and what he does as Banville “art” and he expects his Black books to remain in print longer than his Banville books ¹.    Well this reader is glad Banville created Benjamin Black and Quirke.

Quirke has some typical crime investigator attributes—-is single, drinks too much, and has family issues.  But he is single because his wife died when his daughter was a baby and he gave her over to his sister and brother-in-law to raise. His family problems are driven in large part because Phoebe, his daughter, didn’t know Quirke was her real father until just a few years ago.  Also, he really isn’t a crime investigator.  His job is a pathologist at a hospital, but he hasn’t been there for a number of weeks while he was voluntary checked into a facility to dry out, and he seems not to spend much time there since he checked himself back out.  When Phoebe contacts him to help her find a friend that’s been missing, he engages a real investigator in the local police department who is a friend.

Since the missing girl’s influential family is more worried about a scandal than finding her, a missing person’s report is never filed and the search for her is limited to Quirke’s poking around with some help from his detective friend.  The mystery is eventually resolved but the mystery seems more of an excuse to describe wintery Dublin, consider the relationship between Phoebe and her father, delve slightly into the troubled past of each Phoebe and Quirke, describe Quirke’s interactions with Phoebe’s friends, and touch on Dublin’s views on race during the time of the novel, sometime in the 1950’s when Bing is still popular.

A reader unfamiliar with “Bing” and the war in which April’s dead father was an officer will likely not readily place the timeframe of the story except to note that it’s pre-cell phone.  The timeframe of the story doesn’t really matter much as the dilemmas and conflicts touched on are fairly universal. 

While Banville may consider his crime novel writing a “craft”, he does note he’s pretty good at it¹ and this reader agrees.  His writing enables the reader to feel the wintery cold and wet of the Dublin winter, see the dark lonely streets on which Phoebe walks towards home, hear the sound of the empty wine glass Quirke has drained before ordering a second, despite his intentions. 

What a treat the Little Library box had for this reader.  Now this reader will be seeking more Black novels for more excellently “crafted” crime novels more about the characters and their relationships with others and themselves and maybe a Banville novel as well to see what his “art” is like. 

What a wonderful treat this visit to the Little Library provided.  ¹https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/booker-winner-drawn-by-appeal-of-black-magic-20080119-ge6meh.html

Lethal White

By Robert Galbriath (J.K. Rowling)

Published 2018

Read May 2020

This reader enjoyed reading the first four Harry Potter books with her family—reading them aloud to the kids while camping.  You know the books are engaging when the kids wanted to listen to the book over burning marshmallows in the fire.  This reader listened to the fifth book during long drives to see her hospitalized father.  And this reader likes crime investigation mysteries.  So Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) crime investigation books are perfect long-distance driving companions for this reader. 

This most recent installment of the Cormoran Strike series is the longest and was a perfect fit for a 24 hour drive fest.  This reader truly enjoys that the author takes her sweet time with the development of the twists and turns of the mystery plot while describing the daily challenges of Cormoran’s chronic pain driven by his prosthetic leg, Cormoran’s love life, the slow dissolution of Robin’s brand new marriage, and Robin’s joy of doing this investigative job especially as she goes undercover. 

This reader looks forward to more Cormoran Strike installments.   Likely they won’t be any shorter which is just fine with this reader. 

The Map of Salt and Stars

By Zeyn Joukhader

Published 2018

Read Nov 2019

Joukhader gives us two parallel stories of girls, eight hundred years apart, travelling from Syria across north Africa.  In the modern story, twelve year-old Nour, her sisters, and map-maker mother have returned to her mother’s home city of Homs in Syria, from Manhattan, after Nour’s father’s death.  Nour is the only one in the family who wasn’t born in Syria and she speaks little Arabic.  She does not feel at home in this land.  They become refugees and journey across north Africa in search of safety with family in Morocco.  In the ancient story, actually a fantastical story Nour’s father told her and she now tells herself, Rawiya, a sixteen year-old girl, tricks her mother into thinking she is going to a nearby town for provisions.  She actually disguises herself as a boy and takes her horse on a journey to find and become apprenticed to a famous map-maker.

The two stories parallel each other in the girl’s journey across Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco.  Interestingly, each part of the novel begins with a poem in the shape of a country the girls are crossing.  Each girl faces various dangers.  In the modern story, we don’t learn much about the political situation leading to the need for the journey but rather the author focuses on the personal story of what is happening during the journey and what the main character is feeling.  She has the condition/capability of synesthesia which drives her perceptions of various situations and feeling to appear to her in colors.  In the ancient story, the main character faces down various perils including battles with the great white roc—a legendary bird of prey- and giant snakes.  The contrast between the stories is that Rawiya is seeking (and finding) adventure away from her family while Nour is seeking safety with her family. 

At times this reader wished the novel focused on Nour’s story of fleeing Syria and encountering many obstacles on her journey.  Certainly the descriptions of Rawiya’s adverntures were beautifully written.   They just felt somewhat distracting from the “real” story of Nour’s family’s journey.  But that is likely due to this reader’s limited taste for fantasy.  It’s possible that remembering the ancient adventure story with its successes of Rawiya made it easier for Nour to to bear the real challenges her family faces.    And possibly it makes it easier for the reader to read about these challenges.  Joukhader is to be congratulated in using this interesting approach to tell get the reality of the flight of refugees read by an audience that might not readily choose that topic. 

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

By Olga Tokarczuk

Published 2009

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This translation published 2018 in the UK and 2019 in the US (different publishers)

Read May 2020

As the novel opens, our narrator has been woken by her neighbor (who she calls Oddball) requesting she help him investigate another neighbor’s cottage.  They find the neighbor (who she calls Big Foot) dead on his kitchen floor.  Oddball wasn’t able to reach the police yet (cellphone connecting to Czech 911 vs their Polish police) and he convinces our narrator to help him dress Big Foot and put him on the couch.  During this process they find a bone stuck in Big Foot’s throat, the probable cause of his demise.  They eventually are able to get their Polish village’s police on the phone and the police take over the case.

Our narrator disliked Big Foot as he was a frequent poacher in the forests.   We get a sense of our narrator quite early: “By now Big Foot had gone, so it was hard to feel any pity or resentment toward him.  All that remained was his body, lifeless, clothed in the suit.  Now it looked calm and satisfied, as if the spirt were pleased to be finally free of the matters, and the matter were pleased to be finally free of the spirt.  In this short space of time a metaphysical divorce had occurred.  The end.”

We eventually learn the name of our narrator, Janina Duszejko, although she insists on being called by her last name only.  She was once a structural engineer who built bridges before she became a teacher.  She is now semi-retired, living in a small rural community near the Czech/Poland border.  Only she and her neighbor “Oddball”, and  previously the now deceased neighbor “Big Foot”, stay on their hill during the winter.  Our narrator watches seven summer cottages for their owners during the winter.  She also teaches English at the local school a few days a week.  She spends her days pouring over the poetry of William Blake and “The Complete Ephemerides, 1920-2020”, the latter being her reference for building detailed astrological charts for people based on their birth date and time.  Her former student, who she calls “Dizzy”, meets with her regularly as they work on translating Blake from English to Polish. 

As the winter turns to spring and summer and the police investigate Big Foot’s death, two other locals are found dead:  the police chief our narrator calls The Commandant and a local fur trader and brothel owner, Innerd.  These deaths give our narrator more fodder for her letters and in-person requests to the police to consider that Animals have killed all these men to avenge the murders of their brethren by these hunters.   “I wish to appeal to the gentlemen of the Police not to shy away from the idea that the perpetrators of the above-mentioned tragic incidents could be Animals”. 

During this period we readers are treated to the narrator’s thoughts.  “The best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding”.  In fact the narration feels much more like a conversation the narrator is having with herself than one she is having with the reader.  An entomologist she calls Boros happens into her yard one day.  She gives him tea, allows him to stay a few days while he is waiting for his students to join him and then ““I raised the quilt and invited him to join me, but as I am neither Maudlin nor Sentimental, I shall not dwell on it any further.”  After a time, Boros eventually stops waiting for his students and moves on.

Readers will be glad this reader reveals no further plot elements of this interesting mystery as it unfolds more of our narrator’s story and thoughts.  For this reader, the mystery primarily provides our author a convenient excuse to continue drawing this special picture of our narrator.   She has had an accomplished past and now is semi-retired.  She is progressively isolated from those around her.  Her strident animal protection speech, her devotion to astrology, and her general isolated way of life make it easy for the village to dismiss her.  Her world is shrinking, especially as she lets her neighbors know she can’t be responsible for watching their cottages over the coming winter and she has to give up her teaching.  A man asks her what she has done in life and she remains speechless as she considers this question and answers only to herself:  “For people of my age,” she thinks, “the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there.”  So an interesting and convenient mystery provides a backdrop for this compelling look at a woman who remains vibrant in her thinking but increasing invisible to others.

Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded in 2019) for “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. 

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

by Bailli Kaur Jaswal

Published 2017

Read May 2020

Jaswal gives us a novel that provides some insight into the culture of Southall, a Punjabi Sikh neighborhood of London and the challenges London-born daughters of Indian immigrants face as they mature into adulthood.  When Reese Witherspoon added it to her book club list in 2018 she indicated it was “a mystery, a romance, a family drama….and yes it’s 🔥 🔥 🔥!”

Nikki is a modern young woman, born of parents who emigrated from India.  She no longer lives with her widowed mother and sister in London, but rather lives in an apartment above the bar in which she works, the small apartment being part of her salary.  She quit law school before her father died, which disappointed him greatly, but Nikki was uninspired by the law.  A couple of years later she remains unsure what does inspire her but she is certain she is not interested in marriage soon.  Her sister, a nurse, is interested in an arranged marriage despite having a job that can support her outside a traditional marriage situation.   She sends Nikki to a Punjabi Sikh temple in Southall to post an advertisement about her to attract a potential mate.   While there Nikki manages to land a job teaching a writing class at the Sikh Community Association in Southall. 

Nikki assumes she will be teaching creative writing but quickly learns that her students, Pujabi widows, aren’t all literate.  One of the widows can read and write well and discovers a book of erotic stories that Nikki has purchased for her sister as a joke.  When this widow reads aloud from it while Nikki is out of the room, the other women become eager to tell erotic stories as well. 

In between the women’s erotic stories which are recounted in this book, we follow Nikki’s budding romance with a Sikh young man who also seems interested in pursuing a non-traditional route to love and marriage, a mystery around the death of the coordinator of women’s classes at the Sikh Community Association, the progress of Nikki’s sister’s plans towards marriage, and we are provided dark glimpses of a “brotherhood” of young Sikh men in the community who have become self-proclaimed enforcers of appropriate behavior of women.  Some, but not all, of these threads are carried to some conclusion while others are left dangling leaving the reader to wonder their real purpose in the book.

The book is entertaining and engaging.  We get a small look inside a traditional Sikh community co-existing with a modern city.  But some of the themes are quite universal beyond that specific culture, in particular the question of parental expectations of their children.  Fortunately the main character learns her father had accepted his daughter’s life choice before he died (she learns this from her mother).  The murder mystery is solved which relieves the family of the victim (a young Sikh woman whose reputation has been tarnished inappropriately) of some guilt.  But both of these aspects drilled home to this reader the impact parents’ expectations can have and challenged this reader to consider her own expectations of her adult children and whether they are appropriate or helpful.  Thus this reader was more impacted by this book than she expected to be.

The Overstory

By Richard Powers

Published 2018

Read March 2020

The Overstory has received much attention and some critics wonder why.  This reader does and doesn’t agree with that question.  While at times Powers can seem to beat his drum a little loudly, the novel is a great read for those who appreciate often delicious writing, multiple complex characters, several interpenetrating plot lines, and endings that aren’t tidied up with a bow.  This book certainly offers all of that.  

Powers begins the novel with individual chapters devoted to each of  nine characters.  These chapters are essentially short stories each providing a story about a character that will be either revisited in the rest of the novel or who will become firmly connected with the others characters being similarly introduced.  This reader found the first such chapter to be absolutely beautifully written. 

In this  first chapter introducing Nicholas Hoel, we learn about several generations of his family.  Newly emigrated from Norway, Jorgen Hoel meets and marries Irish Vi Powys in Brooklyn and they move to Iowa.  They bring with them chestnuts which Jorgen plants into the Iowan soil.  The trees and the family take root.  In twenty-three pages we learn the story of the family and the chestnut trees they plant.  Jorgen’s son John takes over the farm when his father dies and decides to photograph the chestnut tree with his newly acquired Kodak Brownie camera.    He takes a picture once a month until he dies and his son continues the task.  That Hoel tells his son:  “Listen.  I made a promise, and I kept it.  You don’t owe nobody.  Leave that damn thing be.”  “He might as well command the giant chestnut itself to stop spreading.”  Thus a set of over 1000 pictures of this maturing chesnut tree is the first artwork produced by this farming family.  We meet Nicholas Hoel, a descendant of Jorgen, who goes to art school instead of becoming a farmer, and who will be an important character in this novel.  We also learn about the blight that took out every Chestnut tree in the US.    Powers thoroughly engaged this reader through his concise and beautifully told story covering multiple generations of a family and the maturation of the chesnut tree.

One complaint this reader has heard about the book is that it takes 153 pages to get all the characters introduced before the “real story” starts.  This reader enjoyed each and every one of those 153 pages as interesting characters emerged from individual short stories about them which sets them up for engagement with one of the several stories in the novel:  1)  activists desperately trying to prevent the cutting of centuries old trees in the northwest; 2) a boy who becomes CEO of a videogame company that captures the minds of players world-wide; 3) a couple whose relationship evolves over the course of a couple decades in ways they would never have predicted; 4) a budding scientist whose original and startling publication about interactions between trees is initially heralded and subsequently scorned sending her into a sort of exile from the world. 

The only significant complaint this reader has about the novel is that after the initial set of chapters/short stories introducing the various characters, the book consists of only three chapter, the first being about 200 pages long and the second 119 pages long.  In these chapters, all four of the major stories are progressed.  This reader prefers shorter chapters that make it easier for readers who aren’t able to simply read through 200 pages in one sitting and who like to revisit parts of the book. The lack of delineation within these long stretches makes the latter action very difficult.

Powers can be a bit heavy-handed in trying to drive his points, but this reader appreciates his approach of using a story (or multiple stories) to engage people into learning new perspectives, learning about new cultures, and learning about new science findings. Regarding science and technology, which Powers often includes in his various novels, his character Patricia Westerford is likely based on real-life ecologist Suzanne Simard and the book she writes is likely a fictional portrayal of The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohleben.   He uses his characters Ray and Dorothy to drive the case for books and reading.  Both characters are avid readers but Ray (a patent attorney) reads only non-fiction while Dorothy reads only fiction.  They try over their years together to convince the other of the value of their preferred reading material type.  After a tragic even, they start reading both types together—-long novels and a book useful for identifying and learning about trees—and each comes to appreciate the usefulness of both kinds of books. 

For whatever flaws readers will find in this book, and, given its length, breadth, and structure, many critiques are possible, Power’s The Overstory has much to be appreciated and enjoyed.   It gives us new perspectives to consider.  Likely its readers will consider trees very differently than they did prior to reading this book.