Book Review: Divorcing by Susan Taubes

´It was strange, slightly embarassing, to have Ezra speak for her and about her in her presence as if she were in a trance or absent´.

Out of the many fantastic books I had the chance to read this year, Divorcing, Susan Taubes´ only novel stayed with me for a very long time. It took me some 2-3 months to write this review, as I needed to figure out over and over again the many details of the novel.

Taubes was born in Hungary, Budapest, as Judith Zsuzsanna Feldmann. Her father was a psychoanalist, her grandfather a rabbi. She left Hungary to America with his father in 1939. Two weeks after she published this novel, in 1969, she committed suicide. Susan Sontag, whose son David Rieff signs the introduction of the last edition of Divorcing, was called to identify her body. The novel was republished in 2021 by NYRB Classics which also recently published her novella.

Sofie Blind, born Landsmann, the storyteller of Divorcing, is death. She was decapited by a taxi while crossing a street in Paris. We will find out relatively late into the story and it may come as a shock. Somehow, from somewhere up, she is telling her story with her own voice. A violent episode, as strong as the protagonist´s desire to get freed from her marriage - thus, the book is not titled Divorce, as a given fact the outcome of a process, but Divorcing, a present continous - , and the chains of a misogynistic society. The severed head though, may be also read - my reading, anyway - in a quasi psychoanalitical key, as a symbol of freedom.

After noticing her own funerals, she is back and forth in her native Hungary and retraces episodes from the past. The modernist key of remembrance and spontaneous references is another part of the book which is important to notice, an innovative take to both memory and writing about memory. 

If there is one New Year´s Resolution I want to make this time, it would be to discover more extraordinary writings like Taubes. I know that my mind is often unfocused and tempted to take all the newly published books onto my shelves, by classical writings with a philosophical touch, especially by women authors, may be a priority as well. 

Rating: 5 stars