Divorcing is a strangely provocative and unsettling work of art—a quilt of memories, dreams, arguments, trysts, snippets of motherhood, and dark fantasies, including an autopsy, a funeral, and a trial. The novel moves across national borders—her working title was To America and Back in a Coffin—and zigzags constantly between gruesome daydreams and mundane daily life. The thresholds that obsess it most are death and divorce, the latter as a kind of death-in-life. Both dangle the prospect of simultaneous anguish and liberation; both illuminate Sophie’s desire for self-possession ... thrilling economy. Taubes whittles the expansive terrain of the marriage plot into a single paragraph ... These pages are full of affairs that veer between unsentimental detachment and impulsive romance, refusing to resolve into any consistent emotional register ... By dramatizing the messy intersections between Sophie’s life as a mother and her life as a lover, Divorcing collapses the madonna–whore dichotomy ... Part of the novel’s brilliance is its refusal to remain trapped in the tonal claustrophobia of either anguish or optimism ... tacking back and forth in time allows Taubes to dramatize, in a nuanced rather than reductive way, the connection between Sophie’s relationship with her husband and her relationship with her father ... It certainly carries the bloody residue of pain and the imminent arrival of death. But the novel isn’t just bleeding. It’s crafted. It shapes pain into something intricate and searching.

Divorcing is an elliptical experiment; its autobiographical aspects reveal themselves only by degrees ... A disorienting, imagistic recollection of various rooms gives way to Sophie’s matter-of-fact description of her own decapitation-by-automobile on Paris’s Avenue George V. This graphic accident would be more jarring had the novel not immediately primed our skepticism ... Divorcing’s structural slipperiness earns Taubes comparisons to Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick in the novel’s new publicity copy, but the book’s closest analogue might be the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel Malina, another nightmare-haunted portrait of a woman unmoored ... If Jacob occasionally made a fool of Taubes in life, she had her revenge in fiction. Divorcing is unsparing in its emphasis on Ezra’s scorekeeping, his potbelly, his intellectual fraudulence ... Ultimately, Divorcing is a compendium of severance: not just a wife from her husband, but a family from their homeland, and a people from their God ... Beneath the surface, the calamity of the Holocaust runs through this fragmented novel like shrapnel ... In one of many linkages of the personal and world-historical, Divorcing also provides a more pedestrian image of disintegration in the form of objects that Sophie and Ezra have misplaced over the course of their peripatetic marriage ... Consider the novel’s final scene: Sophie wakes from a dream of an imagined journey to embark on an actual one. Or does she? It’s difficult to tell. But Sophie isn’t bothered by the ambiguity of her circumstances ... That the simplicity of this conclusion eluded Taubes outside fiction is a tragedy. But she made a life’s work from its absence.

... I have rarely read a novel as death-haunted as this one. This is the story of a failing marriage, yes, but also the account of a cracking consciousness, both in the sense of its literary liveliness and the sense of a mind becoming unmoored and increasingly consumed by suicidal ideation ... Indeed, Divorcing courts death. Which is not to say literary necro-leaning is its only aspect. Nor is it dour. Divorcing is often very funny, always alive, bursting with ideas, full of formal vitality and change ... this feels like a book both stuffed with fiction and nonfiction, memory and play ... Taubes has a fierce imagination and perspective ... One can’t help but read Taubes’s creation in Blind as a self-referential act, what some might call auto-fiction, but this is more exciting and tangled than that usually promises. Taubes took her own life just a few weeks after the book was published, unfortunately. “Divorcing” serves as a singular epitaph, a once missing, now welcome, brilliant work of late modernism.

Knowing how her life ended makes reading the novel at times unbearably sad ... Though Divorcing was her only published novel, her philosophical writing, correspondence, and (one can hope) unpublished fiction await rediscovery. In dark times, it is good to have things to look forward to.

...remarkable ... I’d like to start by saying that it’s funny ... Much of this humor comes at the expense of psychoanalysis. It’s possible there is more talk of analysis in Divorcing than in the entire filmography of Woody Allen ... One short section near the middle of the novel, formatted like a play, presents a kind of afterlife tribunal in which Ezra and Sophie’s father argue with orthodox Hungarian rabbis for possession of her soul. Meta moments like these in Divorcing more frequently feel like feints toward experimentation than an impediment to understanding ... Sophie’s relationships with her parents are beautifully drawn, most impressively in a pair of consecutive scenes recalling her childhood ... Aptly, given all the psychoanalysis, Divorcing is also rife with thoughts about dreams: recounted dreams, dreamlike imagery, the uncertain blurring of dream and reality.

Divorcing teems with stylistic daring, taunts with irreverence, and glints with genius. Reissued this September, Divorcing can now be read for what it is: an astonishing work of art, decades ahead of its time, whose formal innovations and insistent excavation of the unspoken corners of female consciousness we now take for granted as de rigueur ... Experimental and evasive, Divorcing invites obsessive re-reading but resists summary ... Divorcing is both the tale of a dead woman speaking from the afterlife and that of a living woman resisting psychic death and manipulation by therapy and drugs. Taubes constructs the novel as though piecing together a kaleidoscope of experiences from broken shards of glass. The results are uneven but riveting, ultimately concerned with the question of where writing alone—and the novel form in particular—can take us ... the first part of the novel consistently frames writing as an act of control, and for Sophie Blind in particular, a means of wresting back selfhood and agency.

The text streaks from Sophie’s memories of her childhood in Hungary to her drab days in drizzly Paris. At one point, the prose fragments into a play ... We know to doubt the whirl of pictures and fantasies that flit through Divorcing in part because we know that it is a fiction, and a dizzyingly hallucinatory fiction at that ... defiantly ambitious ... Divorcing was ahead of its time not only because it dares to suggest that marriage blinds and blinkers, but also because it is an early exercise in something as anhedonic as autofiction ... Kenner is right that Divorcing is a little too frenetic and a little too abstract. For all her meditations on epistemology, Sophie reveals little about her day-to-day life. We learn next to nothing about what she is reading or working on, and we never actually catch her in the act of writing or theorizing ... Though Divorcing is lamentably sketchy on so many of the workaday details, Kenner fails to appreciate that it is also sublimely scathing in its indictment of the male blowhards so endemic to academic philosophy ... Divorcing shines when it retires its feverish reveries and simply records things as they were. At its most vividly summoned moments, it reconstructs Ezra’s tyrannical outbursts or recalls Sophie’s childhood in scenes that seem excerpted from a quieter and better book.

These passages mix erudite references to philosophy and literature with autobiographical details ... 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.