BookNAround reviewed The Housekeeper and the Professor
last January, but apparently a lot of people were influenced by her enthusiasm, so my library queue took until late March to disgorge it for me. Yoko Ogawa's story is told exclusively by the housekeeper, a pragmatic woman who has been working to support herself and her son since she was seventeen. She seems lonely, but unwilling to waste time on her own emotions when she barely has time for work and her family as it is. But she still has the compassion to befriend the professor, a man with a permanent brain injury that prevents him from remembering anything new. His current memory only lasts 80 minutes; each morning he wakes up with no memories of his life since the accident that damaged his mind.The story concentrations on actions rather than emotions, letting the reader understand from the movement what the characters are feeling. This leaves the emotions somewhat abstract, strongly felt but not verbalized, more a poem than a paragraph. The relationships between the woman, the man, and the boy (her son) are based on immediate events -- love of baseball, the math facts and ideas the professor eagerly shares, the routines the housekeeper sets up for them.
The book is translated by Stephen Snyder, and I think I'll start looking at translators more closely. So far I really like the style of almost every Japanese-translated book I've read, and I'm not sure if what I like is the translation style or a Japanese style of writing. It's a sparse style, where a deceptive simplicity allows a beautiful and powerful story to develop. The picture of a cherry tree works well as the cover of this book with the delicacy and stunning loveliness of a blossom. A
feels a bit like a thought experiment, and a lot of it feels very dated. It contrasts a Darkover woman trying to live and work in the modern Earth society and a Terran citizen trying to achieve status in a rigorous Darkover sisterhood. The back copy describes it as "two cultures, one male-dominated, one egalitarian" which is true although in the book it is the Terran society that seems male-dominated, although only because the Terran woman immerses herself in an all-female enclave, so that it is egalitarian as a matter of course. The Terrans pride themselves on their equality, which seems quaint as Bradley shows them as incapable of grasping the concept of a woman keeping her last name after marriage. The Terrans do not appear in a favorable light, being too busy making assumptions to ever see anyone clearly. But the Renunciate society feels too contrived to be convincing.
and 
have John Flanagan again providing swift excitement, good camaraderie, and even UST! (for the acronym challenged, that's unresolved sexual tension)
by 
starts with Marie and Pierre Curie and continues with daughter Irene, her husband Frederic Joliot, and daughter Eve. I think the standard of controversial science families must be rather low, since the main controversy seemed to be that Marie and Irene were both women (!! yes -- it is true!!). Well, Marie Curie was accused of having an affair with a married man once, and Frederic Joliot became a communist, but then so did most of France (both have affairs and become communist).