Hear about the great books, new and old, that our wonderful staff have been enjoying.
Joanna has been reading:
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
After three quite intense reading experiences, the Hidden Treasures fiction book club is shifting gears. In June, we will discuss the understated novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor, written by Yoko Ogawa. Selling more than four million copies in its original language, Ogawa’s novel is a gently paced story of memory and friendship between disparate people.
A nameless housekeeper comes to work at the home of an elderly former professor of mathematics. What makes this simple narrative setup distinctive is that for the sixty-four-year-old man, time has effectively stopped in 1975, after a car accident that caused him lasting memory loss – now he can’t hold onto any new information for longer than eighty minutes. Every day, the housekeeper must start afresh with the professor; what existed between them yesterday is erased forever.
It is said, by those who know better than me, that numbers can explain the universe and might even create our reality. I don’t have a head for mathematics, at all, but there is something beautiful in the rhythms of the professor’s lessons in number theory as they punctuate the narrative. I do know that there is narrative harmony here, clear, unvarnished prose, and a delicate sympathy between people. The Housekeeper and the Professor is deceptive in its simplicity and elegant in its execution, shaped by perfect numbers into a near-perfect novel.
Harvey has been reading:
Some Strange Music Draws Me In
Griffin Hansbury
I recently finished reading Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury, a coming-of-age novel about Mel, a teenager in a tiny Massachusetts town in 1984. An outcast failing at 'girlhood', Mel is captivated by Sylvia, a trans woman who's returned to the town. Sylvia's friendship prompts Mel to explore her gender, and eventually transition to become Max. We also get chapters from Max's perspective in 2019, as he returns to the town of his youth to sell his mother's house – the same reason Sylvia came back in the 80s.
It's a beautifully written exploration of small-town conservatism, queer inspiration and actualisation, and the complexity of identity and ethics in the 21st century. It illuminates the trans perspective without sugarcoating or preaching, and brought me to tears many times over. I can't recommend it enough!
Fiona has been reading:
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
A story told sometimes by a young man at odds with the world, in other chapters by seventy-year-old aquarium cleaner Tova, and in yet others by a Giant Pacific Octopus in his aquarium glass tank, Remarkably Bright Creatures is one of those stories that brings on constant frissons of delight as readers wait with desperate hope for their paths to cross.
Van Pelt's writing from start to finish is clever, clear and comforting, and never quite as straightforward as you think it will be. Marcellus the octopus has a time limit — he knows, because he is a very smart octopus, that his lifespan is coming to an end — and you wish for more of him, wrapping his tentacles around his hidden trinkets and around Tova's heart and, of course, the reader's as well.
This is a complete joy for those other remarkably bright creatures who, like me, loves books like Sarah Winman's Still Life.
