The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been a fan of Yoko Ogawa's since some short stories I read in the New Yorker, and this is her first novel to be translated into English. Her prose is simple and elegant, and the story here reflects that. Actually, it's as unassuming as the title, and yet it is surprisingly deep and affecting.

The basic story is that the Housekeeper is a single mother who works as a maid to care for her ten-year-old boy. One day, she is assigned to a difficult case: a mathematics Professor with special needs. A car accident in 1975 left him with a short-term memory that resets every 80 minutes, so for him it is always the day before the accident. Yet, his mind is still sharp, and his stories and explanations about math reveal to the Housekeeper a whole new way of looking at the world. Numbers connect everything, and they explain everything. The way the math is presented in the story is easy to understand, even to a dunderhead like me. Ogawa makes sure the reason for any particular theorem is clear to the reader. Each idea is essential to the story.

When the Housekeeper first brings her son to the house, she discovers the Professor has an affection for children. The young man and the old man bond over baseball, and there is a particularly good chapter where they take the Professor to his first ever game, a uniquely problematic thing, he rarely leaves his house for a reason. Plus, they have to concoct explanations for why his favorite player won't be pitching that day, because they can't tell him he's retired.

The main throughline of the book is the connection between these people, of the family they form, and the transience of their bond forcing them to savor every moment. Ogawa avoids Western pitfalls--there is no romance, there isn't a cataclysmic accident that transforms them all suddenly--life just eventually takes its course. The difference for them is that they have now become constants, they are corresponding numbers. It's a shame Yasujiro Ozu is no longer alive, he could make a hell of a movie out of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

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Current Soundtrack: new Timbaland, specifically "Can You Feel It," featuring Esthero & Sebastian

DRAWN TO THE DEEP END

The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been dying for some more Ogawa ever since I read two of her short stories in The New Yorker over two years ago and instantly fell for her prose. A novel that was supposed to come out last year never arrived, and it's been one long tease.

Ogawa writes with unfettered, graceful prose that is seductive in its softness and simplicity, lending even more shock value to her dark subjects. In the title story, a young girl who grew up in the orphanage run by her parents has grown obsessed with the only boy to ever live there long enough to reach high-school age, and her unfulfilled passions start to emerge in acts of cruelty directed at the home's newest and youngest member. It's disturbing without being exploitative and grotesque.

Amidst the calm writing are often wonderful images, such as a snow storm inside the house or lines like "He reappears out of the foam, the rippling surface of the water gathering up like a veil around his shoulders...." Ahhhhh.

The second story, "The Pregnancy Diaries," tackles a somewhat commonplace subject in a unique way. A woman keeps a journal chronicling her sister's pregnancy, writing about it in terms evocative of science fiction and horror. Yet, Ogawa does so without straining the metaphor or using obvious language.

The final story, "Dormitory," details a woman's return to the spartan housing that was her college apartment, and the strange triple-amputee landlord that lives there. It's a mystery tale, a gothic horror story, and yet also a personal soliloquy. The final image shows her reaching directly in the complex patterns that connect all life.

Wonderful stuff. Deep, yet reads like a breeze. Loved it.


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I wrote the above a while ago, but realized I had never posted it here.


The Bottomless Bellybutton by Dash Shaw

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

This review is kind of like an "it's not you, it's me" break-up, because I should really acknowledge that Dash Shaw's The Bottomless Bellybutton represents a certain side of art-house indie cartooning that just doesn't resonate with me. There is a scene late in the comic when the grandmother is at the grocery store, and the man in line in front of her gives her an angry look for not putting a divider between their items. It seemed like an outrageous response to a fairly common situation, and I realized that most of the world is angry or annoyed at the family that is at the center of The Bottomless Bellybutton. As a reader, I should be sympathetic to their plight in the face of hostility, but truth is, I was angry and annoyed with them, as well. I didn't care at all if they got where they were going, and the book is way too long to put up with a group of people who the author seems to be telling us are really the source of their own problems. It's like watching a remake of Little Miss Sunshine by Todd Solondz.

There was one nice moment I really liked, where Peter, a boy portrayed with a frog's head, reverts back to his real face for a moment, when he realizes his new girlfriend doesn't see him as a freak. It's very subtle, revealing that the reason Dash Shaw has chosen to draw Peter as a weird frogboy is because that is how he sees himself, but he's really as normal as the rest of them. The book has multiple instances of characters having warped self-images, but this is the one place where it really comes through as something special.

Overall, the cartooning is about as unappealing to me as the writing. It has a rushed, unfinished quality that grows tedious in the book's first couple of hundred pages. Given that the whole novel is 720 pages, that's a lot of unattractive comics to plow through. I suppose Shaw could be trying for what Douglas Wolk calls a "beautiful ugly" aesthetic, but for me he's way too heavy on the second half of that equation.

Again, I'm more than willing to concede that all of this criticism stems from my personal tastes and is not necessarily reflective of the quality of Shaw's work. There are actually some very good, emotionally heavy moments in Bottomless Bellybutton that struck me despite my struggles to connect with the overall product. Likewise, though I was originally going to complain about an ongoing annoyance with indie cartoonists being overly obsessed with urine, semen, and boogers, as I read, I saw that this was the low-end of a sophisticated thematic metaphor about the way the transmogrification of water is similar to changes humans go through over their life.

In other words, despite myself, I get it; it's just that "it" is not for me.

For an alternative viewpoint, Tom Spurgeon's well-written assessment of the book is what convinced me to read it in the first place.

Current Soundtrack: Brett Anderson, Wilderness

Current Mood: nervous

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

I READ YOU BOOKS AND BROUGHT YOU FLOWERS

The book I am most excited for this year, besides my own, is The Gift of Numbers by Yoko Ogawa. It's her first book in English, and so far I have only read two short stories by her, but when I read "The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain" in the 9/6/04 issue of The New Yorker, I was immediaely captivated by Ogawa's way with words. This was reinforced by her story "Pregnancy Diary" in the recent 12/26/05-1/2/06 issue of the same magazine. In fact, if you look at the long gap between the two stories and consider that I spent that whole time eagerly checking each new issue to see if her name appeared again, you will start to get an idea of how heavy a chord Ogawa's prose struck with me.

The thing that resonates the most with me in Ogawa's work is her ability to take a normal situation and with very simple language make it feel almost supernatural. In "Cafeteria," a woman has moved to a new town and the very regular cafeteria of a nearby school takes on a sort of surreal significance; in "Pregnancy Diary," another woman views her sister's pregnancy like she is in a horror movie where an outside force is taking over someone's body, but without ever making that metaphor explicit. There are no secret fears that the baby will emerge as a monstrous beast eating its way out of the mother's belly, it's all done with hypnotic inference.

So, this is my pick to click: Yoko Ogawa's The Gift of Numbers.

There is no cover art available yet, so I chose this cover of a French edition of one of Ogawa's other books because it should look familiar to Creatures fans.

Also on the literary tip, I posted a short review of Long Hot Summer by Eric Stephenson and Jamie McKelvie on Amazon. Follow the link.

The update on the homefront is that it looks like the repair that was done on Wednesday finally clicked. At least, we've had nearly 48 hours without incident. My understanding is that the problem was when the clamps were applied to the leaks, they plugged them up just fine, but when the hot water was pumped through, the pipes got hot, as did the bolt on the clamp; however, the nut on the bolt stayed the same temperature and so was pushed off by the heat. Once they figured that out, they tried a new solution that appears to have worked.

On the DVD front, Universal is going to replace the cover for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Buena Vista is sending me new ones for The Grifters and Farewell My Concubine, a foxy friend at Fox thinks he can take care of Grapes of Wrath for me, and The Five Obstructions has been upgraded to salvageable. Sadly, Warner Brothers apparently does not make replacements for packaging, not even at a cost to the consumer, so Giant will remain as is. I haven't yet heard back from MGM regarding Fellini's Roma and The Great Escape, and the remaining two films are from smaller houses that seem to have either disappeared or been swallowed by someone else and so I haven't figured out who to contact on those yet. But all in all, the results aren't too terrible.

Current Soundtrack: The Style Council, The Cost of Loving; Erasure, "Rock Me Gently" remix single

Current Mood: relieved

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[to leave comments, click on the time-stamp below, then scroll down on the new page] – All text (c) 2005 Jamie S. Rich