Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for August meeting, 2009
The Housekeeper and the Professor By Yoko Ogawa
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury some seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper with a 10-year-old son, who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her little boy. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory. "The Housekeeper and the Professor" is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
Amazon
By the standards of conventional melodrama, nothing much happens in the novel. Yet by those standards, nothing much happens when you count 1, 2, 3. . . . Still, as the professor will tell you, and the housekeeper and her son will discover, the opposite is true. This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don’t see until you are in them.
Dive into Yoko Ogawa’s world (she is the author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction) and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen. What is the problem with all the men in the housekeeper’s life? Who is the woman in the photograph buried under baseball cards in a tin on the professor’s desk? Can the professor love somebody he can’t remember?
The New York Times
Never before has the beauty of maths been so lovingly explored...a tale that will leave the reader gasping
The Irish Times
The book as a whole is an exercise in delicate understatement, of the careful arrangement of featherlight materials into a surprisingly strong structure. The pure mountain air of number theory blows gently through all its pages, even if at one point there appears to be a blip in plausibility.
The Guardian
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a perfectly sustained novel (a tribute to Stephen Snyder's smooth translation); like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters.
The Los Angeles Times
(D)eceptively elegant ..... This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don’t see until you are in them. Dive into Yoko Ogawa’s world (she is the author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction) and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen.
The New York Times Book Review
Even math-phobes - I'm one - will be moved and intrigued by Ogawa's delicate explorations. (...) Ogawa's account is precise, modest yet dignified, whether she is describing meals prepared (her food sounds terrific), wind blowing cherry blossoms around, or the serenity of prime numbers.
San Francisco Chronicle
As somebody who also felt ill at the sight of a maths text book at school, I didn’t quite share the housekeeper’s enthusiasm for her new subject. There are also severe narrative drawbacks in placing a character with anterograde amnesia at the centre of a story. But Ogawa largely overcomes these through the clarity of her prose and the originality of her approach.
The Spectator
The novel suffers from a lack of trust in itself, and from its insistence on over-emphasis, refusing the subtlety it requires. (...) The aesthetic qualities of mathematics are convincingly explored in Ogawa's simple story. But there is, throughout, the sense that she is attempting something which she fears may be impossible ... Ogawa's ambition is greater than her narrative allows.
Times Literary Supplement
This is a delicate, unhurried story about the friendship that develops between a brain-injured mathematician and a woman who comes every day to prepare his meals. None of the characters is ever named. Nothing romantic or even dramatic ever happens. And there is a lot of conversation about math. Can you hear the marketing team in New York starting to cry ? And yet The Housekeeper and the Professor is strangely charming, flecked with enough wit and mystery to keep us engaged throughout.
The Washington Post
A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre
A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse round his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.
Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, is determined to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client’s survival becomes more important to her than her own career. In pursuit of Issa’s mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the 60-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg.
A triangle of impossible loves is born.
Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the so-called War on Terror, the spies of three nations converge upon the innocents.
Poignant, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is alive with humour, yet prickles with tension until the last heart-stopping page. It is also a work of deep humanity, and uncommon relevance to our times.
Amazon
As ever, Le Carré is particularly good at portraying the quiet ruthlessness of intelligence organisations, and the terror of the moment when an unsuspecting person drops through the trapdoor that separates the everyday world from the secret one. He understands the ecstasy of confession ("there was a certain relief, even pleasure, in becoming a child again, in handing the big decisions of her life to people older and wiser than herself") and the subtleties of the relationship between interrogator and subject. The exploitation of human weakness both fascinates and disgusts him, and he is able to weave the familiar elements of his fictional universe into a plot that unwinds satisfyingly and with a certain sickening inevitability. A Most Wanted Man is an uneven book, but despite its flaws it stands as one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published, a humane novel which takes on the world's latest binarism and exposes troubling shades of grey.
The Guardian
A formidably sophisticated work of fiction, full of energy, rage and great humour. All the qualities for which le Carré's fiction has been admired - his descriptive powers, his electrifying dialogue, his cynicism in the presence of corporate greed and government power - are visible in The Mission Song. That this great English novelist continues to produce work of this calibre with such frequency is simply astonishing.
Mail on Sunday
le Carré is back on form in a cracking terror plot.
Daily Express
Wry, warm, compassionate.
The Times
A cautionary tale, rich in humanity, from a master storyteller back at the peak of his powers.
Glasgow Herald
This is bleak, brilliant, hypnotic stuff and yet another reason to count le Carré among this country's very finest contemporary writers. Unhesitatingly recommended.
Independent on Sunday
Le Carré shows no sign of slowing up or losing touch.
Spectator
A first-class novel about the most pressing moral and political concerns of our time … Le Carré's prose remains clear and unflashy; as unflashy as his spies, who are far more cloak than dagger. This lack of James Bond gadgets and dead bodies make the story all the more credible.
The Telegraph
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