Author, David Rieff. Photo by David Sontag Rieff.
David Rieff discusses “Divorcing” by Susan Taubes, an autobiographical novel with phantasmagoric components: the reimagined end of a marriage. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first released just weeks before its author’s early death in 1969. Unlike other experimental novels from the time period, this one is built to last, and it goes all over the place, with a lot of different threads, and a partly dreamlike narrative. A painful novel about the intimately awful horror of daily life, anyone who reads it will feel torn apart.
Excerpt from “Divorcing” by Susan Taubes.
11 New Books We Recommend This Week
Dec. 10, 2020
Old worlds spring to life in this week’s recommended titles, from a scientific account of Neanderthal culture to a biography of the seminal American foodie James Beard. There’s a new edition of “The Babur Nama,” the diaries of the 16th-century warlord who founded the Mughal dynasty in India. A look back at the golden age of Egyptology starting in 1822 which is to say, a look back at archaeologists looking (way) back. A biography of the modernist poet and painter Max Jacob, and one of Eleanor Roosevelt, and a novel set in Britain in the decades after World War II. And there’s a reissue of Susan Taubes’s 1969 novel, “Divorcing,” which itself has much to say about history and the passage of time.