The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

A story about numbers creating a pathway to something incalculable. The housekeeper and her ten-year-old son are drawn to the housekeeper’s latest client—a mathematics professor whose short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes. His love of numbers illuminates the world in ways the housekeeper and her son unexpectedly find irresistible, as they are beguiled by primes and the elegance of factorials, and the deep kindness and courtesy of the professor himself. (Charmingly, the Professor calls the boy “Root” because his square head reminds him of the square root symbol.) This is a beautiful, beautiful idiosyncratic book, a pure pleasure to read, even if the kid-level math problems sometimes tripped me up. Ogawa’s interest in memory fascinates me; another book of hers I’ve read, THE MEMORY POLICE, is even more intensely focused on the ways memory, and its loss, make and unmake the world. (It was one of the three books that seemed to me to capture how I experienced the pandemic, along with Susanna Clarke’s PIRANESI and Marlen Haushofer’s THE WALL.)

"I looked at the Professor’s note again. A number that cycled on forever and another vague figure that never revealed its true nature now traced a short and elegant trajectory to a single point. Though there was no circle in evidence, π had descended from somewhere to join hands with e. There they rested, slumped against each other, and it only remained for a human being to add 1, and the world suddenly changed. Everything resolved into nothing, zero. 

Euler’s formula shone like a shooting star in the night sky, or like a line of poetry carved on the wall of a dark cave. I slipped the Professor’s note into my wallet, strangely moved by the beauty of those few symbols."