Divide Me by Zero

August 15, 2019
Katya Geller thinks back on her life, loves, and a few stray math concepts. At the center of Vapnyar's (Still Here, 2016, etc.) latest novel is something unexpected: math. The narrator's mother, a writer of Soviet math textbooks, has died before completing her latest work, which would have been the first she'd written since emigrating. Her notes for that book underpin this one. The narrator, Katya, is a middle-aged writer with two children and a husband she hasn't loved in about 15 years. As Katya thinks back on her life--her childhood, first in Sevastopol, then in Moscow; her obsessive love for a schoolteacher; her immigration to New York as a young woman--she finds that her mother's notes ("Encourage kids to do math in their heads ALWAYS, no matter what," for example) provide a strong scaffolding for her thoughts. As a whole, the novel is witty and honest and unflinchingly unsentimental. Katya's voice is perfectly calibrated. But not all the characters are as vividly formed. Katya's mother, in particular, remains a shadowy figure, which is unfortunate since she's so crucial to Katya's development. Katya's husband, Len, comes into focus later in the book, but early on, especially when they first meet and fall in love, it's not immediately clear what she sees in him. Then again, these are minor quibbles. Vapnyar is an enormously engaging writer with a wealth of material to draw from: the absurdities of modern life, of marriage and motherhood, the Soviet Union and the United States--the list seems endless. It's almost impossible to put the book down without devouring it in one sitting. A poignant, vivid, and frequently funny novel.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 26, 2019
Vapnyar bottles a profound sense of discontent in her tragicomic novel (Still Here), chronicling the life and loves of Katya Geller, an immigrant to Staten Island from Soviet-era Russia. Framed by the death of her beloved but difficult mother, a mathematician, the story unfolds in chapters headed by her mother’s notes for a math textbook for adults, which Katya finds also apply to matters of the heart. Katya is a mess of a daughter, juggling her husband, a couple of lovers, and a couple of kids. She tries to make sense of her life, her marriage, and the writing she discovers she’s good at, mining for guidance her childhood in Russia, her parents’ relationship, even the cowardice of her lover, B. She falls briefly for a very rich Russian named Victor and considers a divorce. Among the many pleasures of the novel is Vapnyar’s portrayal of the intellectual connection Katya has with her children, which is disarmingly lovely. Throughout, Vapnyar expertly exposes selfish desires and quiet discontent. This is a frank, amusing, and melancholy novel.

September 27, 2019

Katya Geller wastes no time outlining the defining moments of her life--a recently dead mother, an unhappy marriage, a man who is not her husband with whom she is in love, an engagement to a man who is not the man she loves. And that's just the first page. Born in Russia in 1974, Katya, her new husband, and Nina, her recently widowed mother (a famous author of math textbooks for children), immigrate to New York in the 1990s in search of the American dream. Soon Katya's gift for writing stories in English jump-starts a successful literary career and a teaching position at a New York university. Nearly two decades later, Katya's personal life is a mess, conducted without filters and often at the top of her lungs. Exacerbating her wild, romantic mood swings and paralyzing uncertainty is the death of her challenging mother, who left behind notes for one last textbook that Katya wants to finish. VERDICT Geller's latest is the fascinating story of a brilliant, emotionally volatile protagonist whose wicked humor appears in frequent asides made directly to the reader, along with a smattering of whimsical graphics, and Nina's handwritten notes for her unrealized textbook. Smart, complicated, irresistible.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2019
Katya Geller has already seen perfect love between her parents. The problem with trying to attain such a relationship in her own life is that she gets close but never quite succeeds. Growing up in Russia as the daughter of an oceanographer and a mathematician, Katya is consumed by the quest for that seemingly unattainable bond. The early death of her father and the subsequent verbal abuse by her mother complicates the task even more. Immigration to the U.S., husband in tow, adds an additional wrinkle. Through the lens of her tortured protagonist, Vapnyar (Still Here, 2016) distills and synthesizes different identities: immigrant, lover, wife, and daughter. As Katya movingly explains when she hits her forties, she always thought she lived in an Escher house? I could conduct the different parts of my life in the different parts of the house and ignore the fact that they didn't work as a whole ?a metaphor that can stand for the disjointedness of her entire life. Woven together with math concepts and plenty of raw feelings, this is a love story for those who are forever engaged in the pursuit of happiness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)