On to the books:
Iris Murdoch "The Sea, the Sea" vs. Yoko Ogawa "The House Keeper and the Professor"
The House Keeper and the Professor
This slim treasure of a book was given to me by the father of a close friend. The father is an aspiring writer himself so he and I connected on this issue when he visited and he send me this book which concerns the relationship between an unnamed Housekeeper and, similarly unnamed, math professor whose memory only lasts eighty minutes.
Though filled with "pop" mathematics (as opposed to the more popular pop psychology) and sugary sweetness, I enjoyed reading this book mainly because it made me realize two things about myself:
1) I, for the last time in my life, am living at the perfect age. Let me explain: the Professor teaches the Housekeeper all things concerning numbers, prime numbers, amicable numbers, deficient numbers and perfect numbers. The latter, according to the book, are rare and "treasured" by mathematicians.
A perfect number is a number whose divisors add up to the number itself. For example:
1 + 2 +3 = 6.
The number six is divisible by all these numbers and when you add them together you get, as I just showed, six.
The next perfect number is my age, 28.
1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28
Before reading this book I considered my current age a holding pattern age. Meaning it was late twenties, but not thirty. I was no longer young, but not old and still considered "a kid" by most of my colleagues, even those less than a decade older. It was a pleasant revelation to be living at my last perfect age. It makes me wish I had really started doing something during this age, rather than waiting; waiting for things in the mail, for visas, for news, for permission to do what I want, waiting for my life, in Switzerland, to begin.
I hope in the second half of this age I will cease to wait. For those who are the same age, or soon will be, 28 is your last perfect age. The next perfect number is 492 and, unless google comes up with nanobots that grant us immortality, I doubt anyone will make it that far.
2) This book, which I only read recently, made me realize that I have not properly dealt with my own father's memory deficiency. Following his heart attack two years ago, I doubt my father's memory lasts longer than twenty minutes as he can't watch a half hour sitcom without losing the plot.
The Professor in the book uses mathematics to deal with memory loss and confusion. My father uses silence, confabulated stories and apathetic answers. The Professor endears himself to those around him by embracing his exceptional intelligence. My father endears himself to people because of who he was. He was someone that filled a room with his laugh, controlled, beneficently, conversation, he was someone to whom people could not wait to speak. People still talk to him in memory of this lost conversational gift despite that fact that he rarely responds, or responds as shortly as possible because he does not remember any of the events about which these people wax nostalgic.
I admit that I've wanted my dad to be more exceptional in his brain injury, like the Professor in the book. I've kept my distance because I'm disappointed in the unexceptional father I now have.
There are certain anecdotes I tell about my father's memory (for example, how he can't remember I'm engaged, but he can still remember that, when we play dominoes, I'm deficient in threes) which, were he not my father, I would find interesting. I tell others because they do find it interesting.
But me? Forget all this "interesting" memory bullshit, just give me my dad back. It wasn't until after reading this book that I found the courage to write that sentence.
...I've spent the whole post on the Ogawa book, which means I'm shelving that one. Though I will record here, mostly for my own sake and because it seems apt at this point in my life, the last line of Murdoch's baggy, but booker prize winning novel: "Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?"
Back on the Shelf: The Housekeeper and the Professor
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