Divorcing

by Susan Taubes, David Rieff (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374949
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	92,938
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Susan Taubes (1928-1969) was born to a Jewish family in Hungary. The daughter of a psychoanalyst, Taubes emigrated to the US in 1939 and studied religion at Harvard. She married the philosopher and scholar Jacob Taubes and taught religion at Columbia University from 1960–69. She committed suicide in 1969, soon after the publication of Divorcing.

David Rieff is the author of ten books, including The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami; Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

07/27/2020

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Time and history, as experienced both personally and collectively, are just two of the big ideas this novel leaves a reader pondering," —John Williams, The New York Times

“[T]his formally bold novel will gratify admirers of Taubes' friend and contemporary Susan Sontag, Elizabeth's Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. . . . A wry and cerebral study of identity, marriage, sex, and the interleafing of personal, familial, and national history.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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. . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly

"Divorcing heralded the rise of the lean, epigrammatic fiction of the mid-’70s, such as Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Night. . . . Sophie’s cosmopolitanism, her coolness, her sexual appetite, her exhaustion, her intellectualism and indifferent glamor would become recognizable literary capacities, appealing features of a modern protagonist. . . . Divorcing is the stuff of literary cults. It is vivid and inchoate, its surface slick from recent molting. It is fascinating and flawed, a gathering of antithetical forms, sheered edges, leaps of faith…Some works are merely reissued; this feels more like a resurrection.” —Dustin Illingworth, The Paris Review

“Divorcing is often very funny, always alive, bursting with ideas, full of formal vitality and change. . . . [T]his feels like a book both stuffed with fiction and nonfiction, memory and play.” —Scott Cheshire, The Washington Post

"Divorcing is a compendium of severance: not just a wife from her husband, but a family from their homeland, and a people from their God.” —Jess Bergman, Jewish Currents

"Divorcing, teems with stylistic daring, taunts with irreverence, and glints with genius . . . an astonishing work of art, decades ahead of its time, whose formal innovations and insistent excavation of the unspoken corners of female consciousness we now take for granted as de rigueur. . . . Taubes constructs the novel as though piecing together a kaleidoscope of experiences from broken shards of glass. The results are uneven but riveting, ultimately concerned with the question of where writing alone—and the novel form in particular—can take us.” —Jennifer Schaffer, The Nation

From the Publisher

2020-06-17
First published in 1969, shortly before the author's death, this formally bold novel will gratify admirers of Taubes' friend and contemporary Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye.

Sophie Blind, nee Landsmann—philosopher, secular granddaughter of the former chief rabbi of Budapest, intellectual waylaid by the exigencies of life—has announced her intention to divorce her husband, Ezra, a peripatetic academic with whom she has traveled unceasingly, "on both sides of the Atlantic as far as Jerusalem," throughout their 15 years of marriage, alighting here and there for his various visiting lecturer posts before uprooting and moving on to the next place. Although she leaves him and settles herself and their three children in a Paris apartment, acquired and appointed with the money her celebrated psychoanalyst father gave her "in case" after she married, Ezra has not managed to digest the fact that the beautiful Sophie now not only wants to live apart, but, as she says, "the thought of being married to you drives me insane.” Daily reality and vivid dreams of death, judgment, and humiliation puncture and bleed into one another as Sophie adjusts to a life and identity outside her marriage, sometimes with dispassionate acceptance, other times with a detached sense of alienation. Now rooted in one place where she can "have peace and quiet to write one of the books she had always thought of writing someday," she endeavors to do just that by beginning to write an autobiographical novel. As Sophie delves into her past, divorce appears in many forms: her own rupture with Ezra; her mother's several failed marriages, including to Sophie's father; the break with her homeland when she and her father fled to America; estrangement from the religion of her forebears; escape from the fates suffered by her family members who stayed behind during the Nazi occupation of Hungary and subsequent Russian "liberation"; and the schism between her current self and past versions. Only through writing her novel can she discern the motifs of familial history and reconcile those selves she abandoned in other countries, former lives with the self she is carrying forward.

A wry and cerebral study of identity, marriage, sex, and the interleafing of personal, familial, and national history.

Kirkus Reviews

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