Counting up is not the answer: how can I square the number of deaths and the number of graves? how will I work out how many are born and how many remain? how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting, tearing apart, rending bodies. Weekly or bimonthly corpses which I totted up methodically, and the tally rose like foamy scum, like rage and lava it rose, till I twigged that adding them up was the problem because it makes no sense for the number to rise when we all know the dead fall. The Remainder is, simply put, the story of main character Felipe's obsessive, disturbed quest to calculate the death toll of the wake of destruction around him. Of the 11,000 people who have been officially registered as disappeared, only 104 have ever been found. The Remainder is a story about the aftermath of the Pinochet regime, and the transgenerational trauma that the children of Chile suffer as a consequence of Pinochet’s enforced disappearance of what is estimated to be 11,000 victims. The central conceit of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder is an open problem of sorts, though one of a very peculiar variety. This abysmal darkness might perhaps devour a thousand towering Newtons, it will never be light on earth.' Such is the place of open problems in the regard of mathematicians.

As Farkas Bolyai wrote in a 1820 letter to his son János, cautioning him not to work on a famous open problem of their day: 'You should detest it just as much as lewd intercourse, it can deprive you of all your leisure, your health, your rest, and the whole happiness of your life. Open problems are, famously, the stuff of obsession, even madness. The Riemann hypothesis is perhaps the most famous open problem is mathematics. In the field of mathematics, a problem that has yet to be solved is called an open problem.

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán