A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969.
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 a writer and policy analyst. The son of Susan Sontag, he is the author of several books, including A Bed for the Night- Humanitarianism in Crisis, Slaughterhouse- Bosnia and the Failure of the West, Swimming in a Sea of Death- A Son's Memoir, and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting- Historical Memory and Its Ironies. He has also written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Nation, and several other publications and teaches at the New School for Social Research.
"[Divorcing] is about much more than the breakup of a
marriage. Perhaps it is mostly about misogyny and how it can
discourage and deaden a clever woman. It is also about being
haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust and the ghosts of a
marriage. And it is about the kind of rupture, both personal and
historical, that can't be neatly resolved, not in life nor in a
novel." -Deborah Levy, The Guardian
"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
"The novel centers on Sophie, an already-dead Spinoza scholar, as
she travels between New York, Paris, Budapest, the sky, and the
bottom of the ocean; between Hungarian, German, Yiddish, English,
and French; between intergenerational memories of her family and
its strained relationship to Judaism and interpersonal ties to her
former husband, friends, lovers, and children. . . .
[Divorcing] generates possibilities to imagine fluidity
between living and thinking." -Rachel Pafe, The Baffler
"[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
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