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Lara Vapnyar
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Divide Me By Zero Kindle Edition

by Lara Vapnyar (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 164 ratings
Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction
See all formats and editions

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 caught up in the most common misfortune of all—falling in love.


Award-winning author Lara Vapnyar delivers an unabashedly frank and darkly comic tale of coming of age in middle age. Divide Me by Zerois 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, a universal story with unforgettable lessons for us all.

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  1. Print length
    348 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Tin House Books
  5. Publication date
    November 17, 2020
  6. File size
    12526 KB
  7. Page Flip
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  8. Word Wise
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From the Publisher

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Resplendent."
― The New York Times Book Review

"Divide Me by Zero is a keen, penetrating novel about the quest for love―romantic and otherwise―that drives one woman’s life. Lara Vapnyar brilliantly evokes (by way of, yes, math) a span of decades, a pair of continents, and a plethora of uneasy emotions. This book is so unflinchingly honest about the human condition that I couldn't put it down."
― Helen Phillips, author of The Need

"Divide Me by Zero is, despite its honesty about the difficulties of a life fully lived, a celebration: a sensitively told, honest account of the messiness and beauty of loving with abandon and living in a manner that defies easy categorization, numerical or otherwise."
― NYLON

"One of the greatest books of the last decade."
― BOMB Magazine

"Incredibly inventive and insightful."
― Jenny Offill, author of Weather

"In her superb and poignant new novel, Lara Vapnyar writes about love and other difficulties with the same passion, wit, and probing intelligence to be found in all her writing. Among its many treasures, Divide Me By Zero contains fascinating explorations of the fraught, tangled nature of both romantic and family relationships, and some of the most affecting scenes of bereavement I have ever read."
― Sigrid Nunez, author of What Are You Going Through

"Everything I love about Lara Vapnyar’s vision and voice―her blazing intelligence, skewering wit and exuberant prose―is contained in this wild and witty novel. I don’t know how her work manages to feel absolutely timely and perfectly timeless all at once. Divide Me By Zero is an inventive page-turner that explores familial and romantic love, passion, the inevitability of grief, and the ways we manage all of those things in compassionate and wonderfully surprising ways. I was so sorry when I finished and I’ll think about this book and its characters for a very long time."
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

"Vapnyar'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."
― Library Journal

"Lara Vapnyar is one of my very favorite writers: funny and true and with the rare talent to assemble one ideally telling scene after another. She is also one of the few writers I would recommend to all my friends, with all their varying tastes, because the charisma of her storytelling is unmissable."
― Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

"Divide Me by Zero plunges into dark comedic territory with savage grace. . . . A novel that treats the emotional territory of adulthood with devastating aplomb."
― Foreword Reviews

"Riotously funny."
― Refinery29

"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."
― Booklist, Starred Review

"Elegiac yet funny."
― The New Yorker

"Among the many pleasures of the novel is Vapnyar’s portrayal of the intellectual connection Katya has with her children, which is disarmingly lovely. . . . This is a frank, amusing, and melancholy novel."
― Publishers Weekly

"It's almost impossible to put the book down without devouring it in one sitting. A poignant, vivid, and frequently funny novel."
― Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Lara Vapnyar came to the US from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. She is the author of There Are Jews in my House, Memoirs of a Muse, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, The Scent of Pine, and Still Here. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and Vogue.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07QMGN1PH
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House Books (November 17, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 17, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 12526 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 348 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 164 ratings

About the author

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Lara Vapnyar

Lara Vapnyar

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Lara Vapnyar came to the US from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and Vogue.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
164 global ratings
Must given a try please!
5 Stars
Must given a try please!
The cover is not hard. It is not made with cheap paper. I am Excited to read it. Will update review once I’ve read it.
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Top reviews from the United States

Tatyana N.
5.0 out of 5 stars A book you can relate to on an deep inner level. Especially, if you share a common background.
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2021
Verified Purchase
I have read "Divide me by zero" in one breath, which rarely happens when you read autobiography-based novels. Why? Because everything seems so painfully familiar: leaving USSR with your parents, trying to find yourself in a land of opportunities? Working in places you feel aversion to, just to survive and bring food to a table? Incredibly difficult relationship with your mother? Spouse? Children? All of the above?
It's a great novel, where humor, pain, love, and hate are masterfully placed in a true living motion, true to the details, which could sometimes make a reader cringe. But isn't it what life is all about?
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Maine Colonial 🌲
4.0 out of 5 stars Mordantly witty tale is also a complicated mother/daughter love story
Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2019
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
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.
5 people found this helpful
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Tatyana
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2021
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I would recommend this book for reading.
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gerryb
3.0 out of 5 stars A MIXED BAG
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2019
Verified Purchase
Vapnyar's writing has given me great pleasure over the years. However while I find her short stories delightful, masterful, tragic and hilarious, her novels seem to meander. The character development is great in all her work but the short stories are laser focused and economical. This book was engaging and fun to read, but I found the trope of equating love with math became a bit contrived and cloying by the end. Whereas the stories in "Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love" achieved greater power from their wry understatement in the face of tragedy. I am still a great fan and look forward to more.
4 people found this helpful
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JoAnne Goldberg
4.0 out of 5 stars Dark but witty coming-of-age story
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2019
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
Divide Me By Zero is my first encounter with this emigre author, but I was instantly captivated by her mordant style, her side notes to the reader, and her ability to encapsulate universal truths in pithy statements. In the opening chapter, she states: "wasn't life itself a perfect dark comedy...with its journey to an inevitable tragic ending interspersed with absurd events providing comic relief?"

That sentence summarizes the book, and since the book begins "one week before my mother died," the reader knows whose tragic end is nigh. All the rest, as the saying goes, is commentary. Unlike some reviewers, I found Katya totally relatable, from her devotion to her kids to her disillusionment with romance. I also understood that the novel was mostly autobiographical -- and after finishing the book, I checked, and the basic facts of the author's life match those of her protagonist (an oncologist must really have called her dying mother "mamacita"). It also feels as though the author is using the novel to expiate lingering guilt she feels about her mother, but from a reader's perspective, that effort only makes her look unbearably self-centered.

Meanwhile, the book spends an inordinate amount of time wallowing in imperfect romances, those with her first husband and two other key men in her life. By about 2/3 of the way through the book, I wanted to scream at her to grow up. If I had wanted to read a teen romance, that's what I would have selected. Even in the last chapter, she mourns losing "the person who would love me and forgive me no matter what." And that, at the end of the journey, is as much as we're going to get from this book.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but it also left me frustrated, feeling as though it could have been so much more.
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Loulou
5.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed every bit of it!
Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2020
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I love this book!
Very real description of emotions, enjoyable and unforgettable ending! I highly recommend it to women looking for answers!
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Rimma
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book, very well written
Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2020
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Very insightful and truthful. Interesting characters.
Such a good writing that I now want to read other books Lara written.
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Top reviews from other countries

Victor
5.0 out of 5 stars Depicting Pain
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2024
Verified Purchase
This is an innovative and creative novel that shows how pain can be captured, conveyed and communicated in written words. Instead of showing pain in sound (crying, screaming, whimpering), Lara Vapnyar illustrates great loss of a parent, love and national identity in fragmented scenes of a Russian girl's life events.
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