A celestial overseer observes—and is continually confounded by—a young woman's path into adulthood in this humorous novel, unpublished until now and accompanied by a selection of the author's stories.
The process by which a young girl becomes a woman is often fraught with perils both immediate and nameless. Filter that through the nouveau roman, add a hefty dose of the gothic and a touch of surrealism, throw in a moribund Mitteleuropean backdrop and the looming banalities of midcentury American girlhood, and you might arrive at something resembling Susan Taubes’s novella, Lament for Julia ... An illuminating introduction by Francesca Wade ... To read Taubes is to enter a singular imagination, caught between worlds Old and New, and wandering amid the ruins of belief and belonging that are common to both ... This book is more parody than memoir, reveling in the inevitable divisions and conflicts of selfhood ... Tantalizing.
