Before I Go to Sleep

Christine has just woken up.  She looks beside her in the bed and sees a man she doesn't recognize.  Was she so blasted last night that she can't remember the man she brought home, or came home with?   And then she looks in the mirror and sees a woman about 20 years older than she is, or thinks she is!

It soon emerges that Christine is suffering from a type of amnesia whereby she loses her memories each night when she goes to sleep.  So each day is a brand-new start for her.  She begins to keep a secret journal, and is prompted each morning by a helpful doctor to look for it and read it.  So she can catch up on everything that has happened and everything she's learned since she started writing.  And what she reads fills her - and the reader - with foreboding.  Somebody is lying to her.

Before I Go to Sleep is a thriller. There are no terrorists, no spies, no bombs, no gunshots, no stolen weapons - none of the accoutrements of the usual thrillers.  But like any good thriller, the suspense draws you inexorably on towards the denouement.  I couldn't put it down.

This is a great book and I highly recommend it.  It's interesting that I've read (and posted about) several books this year about memory:  Still Alice about the onset of Alzheimer's and The Housekeeper and The Professor, about a man who can only retain 80 minutes worth of memories.  Advances in understanding the brain, and how memories are laid down and retrieved, provides great fodder for content.  Meanwhile, Baby Boomers hitting the age where memory disintegration is their greatest fear guarantees a great readership for such books.  I'm expecting we'll see more of such books.  This Baby Boomer will look forward to them.

The Housekeeper and The Professor

In Yoko Ogawa's short, quiet, enchanting novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, we meet, not surprisingly, a housekeeper and a professor.  

Brain-damaged after a car accident, the professor can only remember 80 minutes of new memories.  He pins notes all over his clothes to remember important things, one of which is a prominent announcement about his disability.  Before his injury, the professor taught mathematics and he continues to revel in it, especially number theory.  He solves published puzzles in magazines for prize money to supplement his income.  He relates everything in the real world to the elegance of number theory.

The housekeeper, the narrator, is a single mum sent out by her agency to keep the professor's dilapidated house.  A crude picture of her soon joins the slips of paper pinned to the professor's clothes so he can remember her each morning.  

Personal relationships are not the professor's forte (who could build a relationship only remembering 80 minutes?).  However, when he asks the housekeeper her birthday and she responds  February 2 - 220 - he announces that is an amicable number with 284.  (Amicable numbers are related in that the sum of the divisors of each number is equal to the other number.)  Already the housekeeper is a friend to this reclusive man.  

When the professor discovers the housekeeper has a son at home waiting for her after school, he insists that the son should come to his house.  He names him Root because his hair style reminds him of a square root symbol, and soon forms a tender attachment to the son.


Both the son and the housekeeper awaken to the beauty and elegance of numbers under the professor's tutelage and encouragement.  We see the unschooled housekeeper spend weeks of research trying to solve a problem he sets and share her exhilaration when she cracks it.

Along the way, the reader learns quite a bit about number theory.  For me, it reminded me of the fascination I had for number theory when I was taking my math degrees and it completely escapes me why I didn't take any number theory courses at the time.


Ogawa won the Yomiuri Prize for this novel and it has been made into a film.  She has written many other novels, and this one certainly tempts me to read others.