Divorcing
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by 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. 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 Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that 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.
Susan Taubes’s startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored at the time; after the author’s tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to discover a splintered, glancing, caustic, and lyrical work by a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hungarian American writer Taubes first published this brilliant fever dream of the life, loves, and travels of Sophie Blind shortly before her death in 1969. In the opening of the fragmented, looping narrative, Sophie claims she has been run over by a car and decapitated in Paris "My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free" while on her way back home to New York, where she's desperate to divorce her husband, Ezra, after years of being subsumed into married life and child rearing. Later chapters, written in a more traditional, lucid style, chronicle Hungary's turbulent history and Sophie's childhood in 1920s Budapest, her Jewish forebears, adoring father, and distant mother. As Sophie narrates her struggles as the middle child, she traces her persistent need to break away from others. These passages mix erudite references to philosophy and literature with autobiographical details, such as a psychoanalyst father and rabbi grandfather, while other passages channel an immediate sense of Sophie's consciousness ("The sensation of forgetting comes back first, how one walked through years sealed in oblivion"). The result parses how a thinking woman might have gone about divorcing herself from a society that defined her in ways over which she had no control. Taubes's stylistically innovative book is essential reading for fans of Renata Adler.
