Susan Taubes

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.

Divorcing

Her sense of the matter was that things were generally hopeless and that there was no place for her anywhere: the world in which she would have wanted to live had ended before Hiroshima, before Auschwitz. Just when the first trumpet blew that sent the four horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping across the sky, she did not know. But a trip to Europe, any long trip, appealed to Sophie. Time was oppressive, superfuous. And time passed more easily when one traveled.

Divorcing quotes

Join the club