Divorcing a classic novel about misogyny that was almost lost to it
over 4 years in The guardian
Susan Taubes’s only novel was panned when it was published in 1969. Deborah Levy re-examines the witty story of one woman’s epic quest for freedom
Divorcing is Susan Taubes’s only novel. Published in 1969, and now reissued by NYRB Classics, it 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. “What is the proper way to dispose of a wedding gown one can’t give to one’s daughter or daughter-in-law?” the woman at the centre of the book wonders. “No proper way.”
The book is witty and despairing in equal measure, formally elegant in its modernist layering of time and place – I wish I had read it decades ago. Perhaps had I done so, I would have filed it on my shelf between two poets – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton – and the philosopher Hannah Arendt. The daughter of a psychoanalyst and granddaughter of a rabbi, Taubes, born Judit Zsuzsanna Feldmann in Hungary, was a scholar of philosophy and religion and wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil. Continue reading...
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