Review by Booklist Review
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.--Poornima Apte Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 lifeher childhood, first in Sevastopol, then in Moscow; her obsessive love for a schoolteacher; her immigration to New York as a young womanshe 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 Statesthe 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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
