Divorcing

Hungarian American writer Taubes first published this brilliant fever dream of the life, loves, and travels of Sophie Blind shortly before her death in 1969. In the opening of the fragmented, looping narrative, Sophie claims she has been run over by a car and decapitated in Paris—“My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free”—while on her way back home to New York, where she’s desperate to divorce her husband, Ezra, after years of being subsumed into married life and child rearing. Later chapters, written in a more traditional, lucid style, chronicle Hungary’s turbulent history and Sophie’s childhood in 1920s Budapest, her Jewish forebears, adoring father, and distant mother. As Sophie narrates her struggles as the middle child, she traces her persistent need to break away from others. These passages mix erudite references to philosophy and literature with autobiographical details, such as a psychoanalyst father and rabbi grandfather, while other passages channel an immediate sense of Sophie’s consciousness (“The sensation of forgetting comes back first, how one walked through years sealed in oblivion”). The result parses how a thinking woman might have gone about divorcing herself from a society that defined her in ways over which she had no control. Taubes’s stylistically innovative book is essential reading for fans of Renata Adler. (Sept.)