Divide Me By Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

A New York Times Editor’s Choice. As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up. With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman in love haunted by a question: how to parse the wild, unfathomable passion she feels through the cool logic of mathematics?

Award-winning author Lara Vapnyar delivers an unabashedly frank and darkly comic tale of coming of age in middle age. Divide Me by Zero is almost unclassifiable―a stylistically original, genre-defying mix of classic Russian novel, American self-help book, Soviet math textbook, sly writing manual, and, at its center, an intense romance that captures the most common misfortune of all - falling in love.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Adult, Mathematics, Novels

360 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2019

About the author

Lara Vapnyar emigrated from Russia to New York in 1994 and began publishing short stories in English in 2002. She lives on Staten Island and is pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

[John Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel will simultaneously make you smile and break your heart with its dark, distinctly Russian tragic humor.

The main character, Katya, and her family are Russian emigrees living in New York. Katya is a Professor of Creative Writing, and her mother is the author of Soviet children's math books. While Katya's relationships are falling apart, she doesn't see that her mother is dying of Stage IV ovarian cancer.

Her mother leaves behind post-it notes containing fragments of a new math book she is planning to write for adults--not mathematicians but just everyday adults who need a reminder of the importance of mathematics in their lives. Lara Vapnyar incorporates these notes at the beginning of the chapters, connecting these pure mathematical concepts with the harsh realities faced by Katya.

This novel is brilliantly written and packs a huge emotional punch. Yet why is this book so under the radar? I encourage everyone to check out this underappreciated gem from the hugely talented Lara Vapnyar.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divide Me By Zero begins with an encounter between the narrator, Katya Geller, a 40-something mother of two, and a fish seller in Staten Island from whom Katya is buying caviar. “I was brought up in the Soviet Union, where caviar was considered a special food reserved for children and dying parents,” Katya says. The fish seller, another Soviet immigrant, understands Katya’s meaning and the two lock eyes and begin to cry. This moment of intense connection between two strangers charts the course for Lara Vapnyar’s frank and emotionally honest story of love and loss.

You can read the rest of my review HERE on BookBrowse, and you can read a piece I wrote on the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky HERE.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

So hard to describe this book, but I loved it. The narrator, Katya is with her dying mother - a writer of maths text books - telling the story of how she, and her mother and her husband Len, came from Russia to America. Katya has had 330 happy days with Len in a marriage of 17 years, she is in love with B. but having an affair with Victor. She tries to unravel all of this with the notes about maths on yellow cards that her mother was writing before she became ill. It's funny, and poignant, and heartbreaking about death and lost love.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven’t read a ton of novels by Russian immigrants, but all the ones I’ve read have blended melancholy and mordant wit. The characters all seem to look at life as something so absurd and sad that you can only try to laugh at it.

Katya, the main character, grows up in Moscow, but after the collapse of the USSR, she, her mother and new husband Len emigrate to New York. Katya has many acerbic observations about living in the last years of the Soviet state, the Russian immigrant experience, marriage and love (two very different things in her experience).

The one thing Katya isn’t cynical about is her mother, Nina, whose life so differs from Katya’s. Nina and her husband were devoted to each other, while Katya marries and loves unwisely and unhappily. Nina was a brilliant mathematics textbook writer and remains determined to continue that pursuit even when she moves to a country where she doesn’t speak the language and has to settle for being a caregiver. While Nina puts her nose to the grindstone, Katya struggles to adjust to finding new work and meaning to her life. Nina lived for others, while Katya is mostly dissatisfied, thoughtless, and selfish.

We know from the start of the book that Nina has died. Throughout chapters that begin with the text of a notecard written by Nina for an adult self-help math book, Katya tells the story of her near-obsessive relationship with her mother, her love life (extramarital and otherwise), and her relationship with her two children. That last relationship is the only one that is unalloyedly good, and the lively sweetness of her connection with her children allows us to see Katya’s nearly hidden tender side.

Vapnyar’s portrait of Katya is unsparing, which is impressive considering that it seems like it may be based on herself. What’s most impressive, though, is Vapnyar’s depiction of the heartbreaking last few months Katya has with her mother. I think most people who have been a parental caregiver will be able to relate to this.

[Tammy Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book is about so many things: awkward childhoods, marriage, infidelity, the immigrant experience, mathematics, Russian literature, grief and depression. Mostly, it’s one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read about mothers and daughters. Vapynar perfectly captures how complicated the mother-daughter dynamic can be: the fierce love, the sometimes dysfunctional co-dependency, how daughters can alternately push mothers away and long for them to be close by, and how blindly unconditional each one’s love for the other can be. This book really resonated with me, leaving me a sobbing mess at the end. My favorite read so far this year, I think it came into my life at the perfect time.

[Bill Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This long quotation sums up this exceptional novel...it more than fulfills the protagonist author’s ambitions! 4+ stars.

“I’d love to write the novel about Love and Death,” I typed. “How both of those words lost their majestic old meanings. People don’t really ‘love’ each other anymore, they either ‘worked on a relationship’ or ‘succumbed to sexual desire.’ People don’t ‘die’ either, they ‘lost their battles’ with various diseases or they simply ‘expired’ like old products on a shelf. Neither love nor death is considered the most important passage in the life of a person anymore. In my new novel, I would try to restore their proper meanings.” My agent shot back an answer almost right away. “Is it going to be a comedy?” I was shocked and even a little insulted. Comedy? Why comedy? But then I thought that comedy, a very dark comedy, a comedy so dark that it made you cry, was the only form that would allow me to write with all honesty. If I were to truly open up in this novel, and there wasn’t any point in writing it unless I did, I would need comedy, a lot of comedy, to create a protective layer shielding me from being too exposed, guarding me from sounding too bitter. And then wasn’t life itself a perfect dark comedy too, with its journey to an inevitable tragic ending interspersed with absurd events providing comic relief?

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75/5

The brilliance of this novel really sneaks up on you.

The first half felt disjointed and I wasn’t really sure where it was going, but the last half really packed a punch. I also appreciated the first half more when viewed from the end, because it encapsulated the essence of the main character perfectly. The closer to the end I got, the less jumbled the story felt and, assuming it was deliberate, this was a brilliant way to structure the novel, because as the main character starts to gain perspective on her life and loves, so does the story become clearer for the reader.

By the end of the story I had a deep appreciation for the characters, which at first just seemed shallow and unlikable. They were thoroughly imperfect and very human characters.

This story is an ode to love - in all its messy, hypnotic, obsessive, real and perfect forms.

[Sonia Reppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I was going to love this book by the second paragraph:

I did eat caviar in a romantic setting once. With a very rich Russian man who I agreed to marry even though I was still married to Len and still in love with B.

I know quotes are not allowed before the release date unless checked with the publisher, but those sentences are so perfect, no way will they edit or change that. Also, the last sentence at the very end!
This book might be my favorite of 2019. Right now it ties with City of Girls. They have equally good stories; COG has more colorful characters, whereas this book has a perfect, profound ending. There are not many perfect endings. This is very rare.

Katya's mother was a math expert; in her last year of life she wrote down philosophical notes framed with mathematical truths that Katya uses to provide context for looking at her own life. This 1st-person POV immigrant/mother-daughter/coming-of-age story spans Katya's childhood, marriage, immigration to New York, early career, reluctant motherhood and love affairs up until her mother's end of life, which correlates with some other endings in Katya's life.

SO GOOD!!

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cleverly written, with a Russian immigrant point of view that is alternately sad and amusing--and always heart-wrenching. I absolutely loved the end (last 50-75 pp or so) and, most of all, the actual ending. In fact, I reread that last graf multiple times, wiped away tears each time.

[Alta]

One of the most intelligent novels I read in a while. I highly recommend it.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an enjoyable and captivating book. Great characters and I even liked the math!!

[SundayAtDusk · Rating 2 out of 5]

After sleeping on this story, I decided to drop my star rating from three to two. It was going to be three because the book was readable enough to finish in two sittings. (That’s readable enough, not interesting enough.) What we have in this novel is a protagonist named Katya who is terribly self-absorbed, but not self-pitying. (Her Russian upbringing obviously made it impossible to be the latter.) She is a writer who sees herself as still being part child, and even becomes engaged to someone because he sees the child in her.

Her whole life up to middle-age seems to be mostly a pursuit of true love, like she imagined her parents had. Even getting married and having two children did not stop her from searching for more happiness, than she presently had at the time. Included in this story is a graphic description of someone slowly dying at home. Oh joy. Something to brighten up an otherwise drab novel. I must confess, if it was Katya who had died, I would have felt nothing, except gratitude that her self-indulgent story had come to an end.

(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)

[Matthew Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the clear parallels between the author and the protagonist, this is doubtless as much fictionalized autobiography as novel. This is merely an observation, and not a criticism. Many of my favorite authors (e.g. John Irving) are clearly processing through their own lives and exploring their own identity through their fiction.

This act of anonymizing oneself - of changing the details while retaining the essentials - has the added effect of allowing one to disclose without disclosure. Through this veil of plausible deniability, we can confess without confession, and serve the need for connection that perhaps defines humanity more than anything else. As the author herself says (through her character), "I’m a private person. I don’t chat with strangers. I don’t share things. Except, of course, in my fiction."

The various connection between people (and sometimes the failure of those connections) is really the unifying topic of this book. As in life, there are no concrete conclusions, no easy answers, no reliable guideposts; only that need that must be served.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of books about writing books. In the first chapter of Divide Me by Zero the main character Katya, a writer, has an email exchange with her editor:

“I’d love to write a novel about Love and Death,” I typed. “How both of those words lost their majestic old meanings . . . Neither love nor death is considered the most important passage in the life of a person anymore. In my new novel, I would try to restore their proper meanings.”
My agent shot back an answer almost right away.
“Is it going to be a comedy?”
I was shocked and even a little insulted. Comedy? Why comedy?

This made me laugh out loud, and of course what follows is both a very sad and very funny novel. Katya is a marvelously smart, emotional, and self-deprecating guide though her life’s biggest loves and her life’s biggest losses. Very unique, charming, and unpretentiously meta.

[Alexandros Potapidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is one thing to read an interesting story, another to read a well written one, and a completely different matter to read about a subject that you are drawn to - a very subjective issue for every reader. Divide Me By Zero encompasses all these three elements in a most allegoric and simplistically beautiful way. The story is interesting because it appeals to fundamental human themes of life, death, family, immigration, of becoming, and love. Along with some maths. Plenty of maths. In fact most episodes of the storyline are examined through the prism of maths and vice versa. You might think how is it possible to read through something so tangible as the everyday human interaction with each other through something so abstract such as maths. We all use maths in our everyday life, but we don’t see our lives through an algebraical or geometrical equation. This is exactly how Vapnyar’s imagination, dark humour, and skilful dexterity to present something so complex in a simple and understandable way comes in. Her metaphors are exquisite at best and witty at worst.

Finally, when it comes to the greater context of the book, this is located in the midst of the Soviet highs to the collapse of the red empire, and the immigration to a new country and a new philosophy of life - from the socialist austerity to the capitalist plethora of consumer goods. I am particularly interested in the post-soviet transition of eastern European countries to the (not so) new western style social order. This is probably because of my personal experience of making this transition in a young age where the memories are still abstract and incoherent. More recent works of the same genre about the topic of bridging the socialist/post-socialist with the capitalist on individual level include The Wife Who Wasn’t by Alta Ifland, Jacob’s Ladder by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. Vapnyar is the one who managed to reconstruct her character’s (Katya Geller) identity in the most original and humorous way. The chapter about how Katya’s parents met and how they were married to each other, along with their jobs, is one that describes better than any the Soviet system. “People were allowed to live and work in peace, unless of course they tried to stir things up. Those ended up fired or exiled (if they were very lucky) or locked in psychiatric asylums (if they weren’t). I wonder if this is why both my parents found fields that were timeless and infinite, to exist beyond politics, like Ocean and Math, so they wouldn’t be tempted to stir things up”, (p. 16).

A few words about Katya, possibly the alter-ego of Vapnyar. Katya is fierce, combative, extremely intelligent, passionate, funny, and originally unconventional in ways that can be perplexing. Her actions are guided by her passionate belief that her feelings need to be heard and taken notice of. This has led her into awkward actions that resulted into embarrassing her but also revealing how genuine her personality is. Her crude honesty, manifest in her actions and thoughts, provides ample example of Katya’s unconventional approach to life. “I spent the happiest three days of my life […] with B. […] in a cheap Staten Island motel […]. No, the births of my children were not the happiest days of my life. Both times, I was physically torn apart, and heavily drugged.” (p. 297-8). With Katya one feels that life can start and end at the same time, the banal can become outlandish, and the simple complex. “There we sat at the picnic table and had a calm, grown-up conversation. Everything was peaceful until Len pinned me down and tried to struggle me.” (p. 262). Significantly, if someone likes drama in their lives, Katya is the character to fall in love with. And by the way, she is very intelligent and astute in her vocational interests.

Katya managed to convert from a math’s (semi) genius into a US university teacher of creative writing. The significant part is that she learned English by watching Hollywood movies. This is a demonstration of the versatility of the Soviet educational system because of the incorporation of “soft” disciplines, such as history and language, in the curriculum of “hard” disciplines, such as maths and physics. Such a symbiotic relationship is manifest in the book when Katya compares maths with religion, calling them both “endlessly abstract and irresistibly precise”. She certainly captures the central philosophical underpinning of both disciplines because they help us “grasp the entire world […] and make it seem less chaotic, unpredictable, and scary” (p. 220). Whatever the merits of her insights, Katya does not make political pronouncements. Even when she does, they are wrapped in dark humour to the extend that it is hard to determine where her beliefs start.

The one part where Vapnyar runs out of humour is when describing Katya’s mother in the last few weeks leading to her death. Katya’s thoughts and actions incorporate all the elements of devastation, emptiness, mourning, sadness, and guilt. It is striking to consider that losing one’s mother is not just losing the mother, but also a mother. Not just that very specific person that was the mother, but also a person “who would love me and forgive me no matter what, even when I was being stupid, cruel, awful” (p. 353).

I admit I have not read many books in 2021, but this is by far the best fiction of all.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking, honest and hilarious ode to her mom, her love lives and touching book to process her grief 😢 I want to give her a hug

[Dragana · Rating 5 out of 5]

...or add wit, sorrow, humor, intelligence and observational powers, multiply by sublime (second) language, and the result is a wonderful book. Lara Vapnyar's writing is a marvel.

[Mallory · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn't a bad book, it just wasn't for me. Divide Me By Zero attempts to defy genre by incorporating a mixture of different mediums — graphics, pictures, authorial asides — in order to make this a novel, but not quite. I found the authorial asides to be redundant and gimmicky, and the sporadic placement of these asides was clumsy and, frankly, annoying.
Although some of the stylistic components feel forced, the timeless and introspective explorations of love, grief, loss, and passion that the novel analyzes allow me to believe that this novel is not wasted space. Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert might fall in love with it.

[Hilary Zaid · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this novel, Vapnyar is a master of voice. So good. Sign me up for more.

[Linda Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many writers attempt to produce a story that rings true for a wide range of readers. Most don’t really succeed. But in Divide Me By Zero, Lara Vapnyar moves in so close to her characters with her literary camera that their faces blur and become ours. Her observations are spot-on as she describes Katya Geller’s life, her relationship with her mother, finding and losing love, and the decisions she had to make as an immigrant from Russia. Asides to the reader make it not just a story but a conversation. I am not going to be finished chewing on this one for a long time.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novel in the form of a memoir. I was about halfway through before I admitted to myself that I was bored; that I didn't particularly like the narrator; & that her complicated relationship with her mother left me cold, as did her complicated love affairs & betrayals. I didn't really "finish" the book, so much as skim it. I still don't know who she ended up with. Reviews of this book had raved about it being "poignant, vivid, and frequently funny," but I didn't see that.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an emotional book with an interestingly different story. It’s denser than I expected, but the prose is very nice. Worth reading.

[Kaelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not immediately impressed with this novel, but it grew on me after about 100 pages. The emotion in the story felt very real and I often felt myself getting sucked into Katya’s world.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mathematically clever but 50 pages too long. I was really irritated by the narrator in the end.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this autofiction or autobiographical novel, the first-person narrator is Russian-born Katya Geller. In middle-age, she is a writer, a professor, the mother of two teenagers, recently separated from her husband, Len (though the marriage probably ended before they had children), is pining for her off-and-on again lover, has recently ended a fast engagement to a billionaire Russian, and her mother, a writer of Soviet math textbooks, is dying in the family's Staten Island house. At her death, Katya finds her mother's notes for a math book she wanted to write for adults, which would have been her first since emigrating with Katya to the US. Vapnyar uses two kinds of devices: the framing device of her mother's math notes, which, as a non-math person, weren't particularly illuminating for me - although the ways in which Soviet math problems were created is very funny, and direct notes to the reader, some of which are amusing, some a little trite and self-evident. The book takes us from the mother and daughter's life in Russia to the US. Darkly comic - I laughed aloud a bunch of times - Katya is an engaging voice and character, with bright and apt takes on marriage, motherhood, Russia, America, love, etc. A fun read.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katya is a Russian immigrant in New York who lives with her husband, two children, and her mother. The story revolves around the relationship between Katya and her mother, a math professor who she both loves and has never understood. Her parents’ great love for each other, tragically cut short by her father’s early death, inspires Katya to yearn for an epic love of her own. Unfortunately, she is torn between her husband, her first love, and the rich man who loves her more than she can ever love him.

Mathematics is at the heart of the book; each chapter begins with a quote from one of her mother’s math textbooks. Trying to create a lineal and logical approach to love brings Katya nothing but frustration. She tries to examine the pros and cons of every scenario in her chaotic life, but nothing adds up for her. She and her mother appear to speak different languages, and the situation only becomes worse as her mother is diagnosed with cancer and begins to prepare for her inevitable death.

Witty, tragic, funny and sad at the same time, this is a book full of contradictions but infinitely gratifying to read.

[LucyV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Math + family who moves to NY + bad behavior + more bad behavior + strained relationships + life + coming of age = Divide Me By Zero.

This is not a happy book that Lara Vapnyar has written but it does have humorous viewpoints in situations we all recognize and heartening moments. Told with un-sugarcoated honesty from a first-person point of view and interspersed with real photos to illustrate a point - this book made me wonder if it is fiction or an autobiography or a talented novelist toying with me, the reader. I am always impressed with authors from another culture grasping the nuances and vocabulary of the English language so thoroughly and so much better than I ever can. Readers who enjoy Gary Shteyngart's works may also enjoy Divide Me By Zero.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I would have loved this book purely for its portrayal of youth in the Soviet Union followed by emigration to the United States and the excellent setting and distinct characters described, but what really put it over the top for me was the evolving relationship between the protagonist and her mother, who dies in her care very shortly after her 67th birthday. The math book that the protagonist tries to assemble is fascinating and poignant. The kids are wonderfully human, which sometimes feels rare. This book reminded me a lot of Lost and Wanted in female platonic yearning for a women of science/math.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. Mainly revolves around the narrator’s relationship with her mother and her love life. Great structure and tone. And Katya loves Alice Munro, I loved the part where she first discovers her writing!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life of a Russian Jew who emigrates to the US with her mother and her new husband. Very offbeat and funny, though it gets more serious as it goes on