The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador, 2009 (originally published 2003)
180 pages

Who would have thought that I would have become so enchanted by a book about math and baseball?

"Is that so? I'd always thought that human beings invented numbers."
"No, not at all. If that were the case, they wouldn't be so difficult to understand and there'd be no need for mathematicians. No one actually witnessed the first numbers come into being -- when we first became aware of them, they'd already been around for a long time."

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a quiet, gentle story which somehow manages to encompass a great deal without very much happening. It is told in a humble, somewhat detached way by our unnamed narrator, a young, veteran housekeeper who is hired to take care of the Professor. A brilliant mathematician, he lives alone in a small shack on the estate of his well-off, widowed sister-in-law. In 1975 he was in a terrible accident that left his brain unable to make new memories; after 1975, his memory lasts only eighty minutes. There have been many other housekeepers before our narrator, but somehow our narrator and the Professor click. What could have been a difficult assignment turns into a wonderful, if unusual, friendship.

This can't have been an easy book to write, but what a gift it is to the rest of us to be able to read it. I think the narrator could have been telling us about toe jam and I would have read it and happily. Instead, she's telling us about math, memory, friendship, and baseball, reminiscing and thoughtful. The language is evocative and beautiful; there are no moments where I was brought out of the text by a clumsily translated line, though every once in a while I was caught by the poetry of it.

If you added 1 to e elevated to the power of π times i, you got 0: e^πi + 1 = 0. 
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.

It was the narrator herself that held me firmly to the story. She is quiet, unassuming, and always distanced, but reading between the lines one gets a picture of her: patient, hard-working, very bright, stubborn and strong, and incredibly kind. She hasn't had an easy life, though we don't get too many details as the story isn't supposed to be about her. She tells it mostly chronologically, though every once in a while there is a small jump forward or backward; it's never hard to figure out where we are in the narrative. Her sense of wonder at the world the Professor opens up to her is palpable if understated. When we are introduced to her son, nicknamed Root, we recognize her deep love for him, as well as her desire for him to have everything she can offer, and more.

The book is evocative, whether of its characters, mathematics, baseball, or the setting. A heat wave, a storm, a garden, an evening ball game, a busy street -- after reading these words about them, the real world is set at a different, more quiet, contemplative angle.

What is most interesting to me is that this is an easy book to read. It manages to be a lovely story on the surface, while having difficult themes, being beautifully written, and about topics I would normally avoid, without being a painful or dense read. I'm still not a baseball fan, but I can appreciate a different side of the game now; I will never be deeply enamoured of mathematics, but I can certainly understand how one might become so.

Reading this book was a treat, and I'd encourage everyone to pick it up, even if it doesn't seem like it might be your thing. It's not full of action, excitement, or romance, but if you're looking for something a little quieter, a little more meditative, something that reads smoothly and rewards attention even if it doesn't require it, you cannot go wrong here.

Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stephen Szymanski

First, a brief DNBR Day report:

I did okay. I finished three books, and started a fourth. Two of those three were from the Bone series, so it's absolutely not that they don't count; it's just that they are short. And quick to read. So I feel I could have read a lot more, except that partway through the fourth book I hit the wall. I hit it like an excited, floppy-eared dog hits a sliding glass door. I hit a book that I expected to enjoy, I was really looking forward to, and was horrified to discover around the fifth chapter that I wasn't enjoying it at all. I was bored and incredulous. I tried to pick up anything else I have lying around here and just couldn't find anything to engage me at all. So... the short of it is, I did more than just read yesterday. I did still thoroughly enjoy my reading, at least up until the last five chapters, so I consider the day a success; next time I'm going to bring home a much wider range of books in case I hit another wall.

And now! On to the review. Of note: this book has a different title across the pond, of course. There, it's titled Why England Loses. I prefer our title, I think it has more of a ring to it; but the English particularly are rather picky about not calling the game soccer.

I have World Cup fever. I get it every four years or so, and this year I got it hard. I put myself in charge of a World Cup display at work, and have been keeping the game scores updated and asking people which team they support, and charting that on a little graph. So far we have equal and large numbers of England/Brazil/Netherlands supporters, with a few smatterings of other countries: Italy (poor things), France (ouch), Portugal and Spain and Argentina and Germany (would have thought more than two supporters each), Japan (they were my pick, and sooooo close they were) and Ghana among those.

So, as I was watching some excellent soccer, I decided it was time for me to pick up Soccernomics, which is a book I've had my eye on for some time. I've heard Simon Kuper interviewed a couple of times and he always seems like a really intelligent guy, not to mention interesting and funny. If I'm going to read a book about sport and statistics, he's the kind of guy I'd want writing it. Turns out, my intuition on this point was correct: Soccernomics is really interesting, often funny, and enlightening on both soccer and the human condition. Kuper and co-author, sports economist Stephen Szymanski, have managed to write a book analyzing soccer and its fans that is loving, enlightening, and eminently readable.

The whole thing is pretty fascinating, but the part I found most interesting was the dissection of England's national side and England's national expectations. The whole section is pretty scathing without being nasty. It was particularly fascinating watching the reaction pour in to England's defeat at the hands of Germany; Soccernomics (published in 2009) predicted almost all of the fan and commentator reaction I caught on BBC's live commentary pages, in some cases in exact words. Soccer being invented by the English, and dominated by the English at the start, the English believe that they should always be the best. That is the players, the media, the fans, the soccer establishment: there's a manifest destiny-style feeling about soccer in England. Kuper and Szymanski systematically and logically dismantle this: no matter what anyone believes or feel should be the case, the numbers say that England actually overachieves in current-day international play. This is not to say that they are the best that they could be -- Kuper and Szymanski also offer several points that hamper England, including systemic if largely unconscious discrimination against middle- and upper-class and foreign players/managers, and consistent refusal by the vast majority of suits in England's soccer establishment to use the numbers and think logically about the game, and instead swearing by traditional "wisdom." Nothing about international or professional soccer is given a free pass with this book -- it's all put under the statistical microscope, examined, and explained.

I think part of the reason I found this whole discussion so engaging, aside from the fact that it's so well-written, is that I recognized a lot of the advantages and problems with English soccer from Canadian hockey. Ice hockey is in no way the international sport that soccer is, and never will be, but it's a lot more international than it used to be. And the exact same problems -- and advantages -- of English soccer can be identified in Canadian hockey. We have the same feeling of entitlement and when the Canadian international team loses we feel the same sort of outrage and shock that English soccer fans feel when the English team loses. You also see the same kinds of ugly anti-foreign sentiment, the sort of thing that makes me embarrassed to say I'm a hockey fan, the sort of thing that would be considered racism anywhere else but gets a pass in our respective "national" sports. The traditional management "knowledge" versus actual science. It's all there.

In the interests of not going on too long, I'll hold most of my other thoughts there. Aside from the content, the bones of this book are solid. The mathematics are clearly explained and not at all confusing or overdone; for someone who isn't always particularly fond of math, I had no trouble with it here and even enjoyed the way the statistics was explained. Every once in a while there is a bit of repetition that seems needless, sometimes across chapters and sometimes it is worded so closely that it almost seems like an editing mishap -- the one I'm thinking of is the discussion of etymology, whether or not the word "soccer" is actually an Americanization (it's not; apparently before the 1970s the English tended to call it soccer, too, which puts lie to the argument that North Americans call the game "soccer" to differentiate it from American football.) There are other areas where connections and comparisons could have been drawn a little tighter, as in the discussion of the Premier League standings near the beginning of the book and then the international standings further on. But overall, I thought this was an excellent book.

One doesn't need to be a soccer fan to enjoy it, although it certainly helps to know some of the names of people and teams. I think being a sports fan, though, is probably a prereq. Though there is some anthropological discussion (what is a "fan"; big sports tournaments save lives, by reducing the number of suicides in the countries that have teams participating; and there's a discussion of how and why poverty-stricken countries will never do particularly well at sport despite traditional arguments to the contrary) there is not enough to engage someone who isn't already at least peripherally interested in sport as an institution. But any fan of any team sport will probably find something in here, and enjoy the read.

I'm very keen to read a couple of Kuper's other soccer-related books now, including one about soccer in Europe during World War II and another about the social and cultural implications and ties of soccer, called Football Against the Enemy which sounds absolutely fascinating. Szymanski's other work seems to be primarily economics-related, which while I'm sure some people would enjoy, is not exactly my thing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a soccer match on.