Divorcing, Paperback/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. About author(s): 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.