As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, at 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. Half-mad with grief, Katya turns to the unfinished notes for her mother's last textbook, hoping to find guidance in mathematical concepts.
Vapnyar 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, 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.
There are a handful of novelists who excel in describing, often from ludicrously comic heights, the Russian-American experience. Call it the Borscht Shelf: Gary Shteyngart, Boris Fishman and the resplendent Lara Vapnyar ... Divide Me by Zero, which begins with Katya’s Russian childhood and ends in her American middle age, is structured throughout with Nina’s flash cards and various missives from Katya ... The content of these notes leans toward the tediously self-evident ... The framing can feel contrived, though it’s in keeping with Vapnyar’s track record: deeply affecting but playful, edging into cutesy. The world hews closely to Vapnyar’s own life...but everything about it is slightly notched up, surreal ... So goes the bildungsroman half of the novel, which hits its stride midway as a brutally sad romantic comedy. ... Divide Me by Zero is a mordant tribute to lost loves, none more beloved or irretrievably lost than Katya’s mother.
... plunges into dark comedic territory with savage grace ... A novel that treats the emotional territory of adulthood with devastating aplomb, Divide Me by Zero grasps the event horizon of parent-child relationships and the reckonings that lie in wait when their fundamental structures pass on.
