Editor’s note: After a 30-years-plus career in publishing, Ann La Farge now works as a freelance editor and syndicated book review columnist. She lives in Dutchess County, NY.

Like shoes or traveling companions, books must be chosen carefully to match the occasion. Sometimes, you want a big, thick tome, a long-term book, the kind that requires a bookmark to mark your place after each evening’s reading, a five-course-meal of a book. At other times, you want something light, short and eminently portable — a book that fits inside your backpack or purse.

I was late to discover this perfect traveling companion, Yoko Ogawa’s beguiling novel The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel, translated by Stephen Snyder. The professor, who lives alone, has seen nine housekeepers come and go. Now, a new one has been assigned to care for him. The old fellow had a terrible accident several years ago and has a unique memory problem: He can’t remember anything after 1975, except for an 80-minute window of short-term memory each day. Then it is erased.

The new Housekeeper, who tells the story, promises "never to disturb him while he was thinking, but he was always  thinking." 

What he was thinking about was numbers: “He talked about numbers while I worked in the kitchen” — amicable numbers, imaginary numbers, perfect numbers, irregular numbers. The professor loved prime numbers more than anything in the world. When he learned that the Housekeeper had a ten-year-old son, he shouted “Bring him!” She did, and the professor nicknamed him “Root” because the flat top of the boy’s head reminded him of the square-root symbol.

And so a family of sorts — one that must be re-introduced each day — is born. They play games with numbers. They take the professor to a baseball game, which, of course, he forgets. And when the Housekeeper’s job is threatened, it is saved by a mathematical formula "like a line of poetry carved on the wall of a dark cave."

Only a very talented storyteller can kindle a reader’s interest in a story centered on seemingly unappealing (certainly to this reader) subject matter — mathematics and baseball — but this elegant fable will captivate every reader who discovers it. Dare I use the word "magical" to describe this lovely novel, a novel that will remain in your memory far longer than 80 minutes?

Yes.

Click here to read an excerpt of The Housekeeper and the Professor.