Divorcing, Susan Taubes
Divorcing, Susan Taubes
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Divorcing

Author: Susan Taubes, David Rieff

Narrator: Lisa Flanagan

Unabridged: 9 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/01/2021

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Women


Synopsis

Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by a dazzlingly inventive writer; 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. It's a rift that encompasses not just forced exile and estrangement from her adopted country, but a profound rupture and alienation from her husband, her family, her Jewish identity, and her own fractured self. 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 own Freudian father and beautiful, narcissistic mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that most 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.


About Susan Taubes

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Melissa

Susan Taubes wanted to call this book To America and Back in a Coffin, but her publisher wouldn’t let her......more

Goodreads review by James

I liked it, I liked it! I suggest Mikey and the surprise attending his liking a particular breakfast cereal, Life, because the "Introduction" to Divorcing by David Rieff suggests I won't like it. Worse, that it's not very good. I'd imagined an uphill slog to reading it but was pleasantly surprised h......more

Goodreads review by Come

Questo è l'unico libro scritto da Susan Taubes. E grazie a Fazi Editore per averlo tradotto e pubblicato. Leggevo su una rivista letteraria che la scrittrice ungherese che è vissuta in America, in seguito a una recensione negativa, si è tolta la vita. Infatti, il New York Times, in un articolo datato......more

Goodreads review by Peter

Sort of a suicide note or the your-whole-life-flashes-before-your-eyes-when-you-die book. The former is because the author killed herself after publishing this novel to no acclaim in 1969. The latter as it reads like an autobiography from beyond the grave. There are similarities to the writer and he......more

Goodreads review by Bridget

An experimental novel is never easy to sum up. Taubes’ general mystique is pretty interesting, this book merits a re-read it’s dense and weird and I liked it! But if you like a clean cohesive narrative this is not for you.. it reads at times like a surreal fever dream at others a dip into a specific......more