Divorcing

Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by a dazzlingly inventive writer; one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century.

Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorce is not just a question of a broken marriage but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. It's a rift that encompasses not just forced exile and estrangement from her adopted country, but a profound rupture and alienation from her husband, her family, her Jewish identity, and her own fractured self. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her own Freudian father and beautiful, narcissistic mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that most haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life.