Merve Emre at The New Yorker:
Susan Taubes’s novel “Divorcing” (1969) begins with a report in France-Soir of a femme décapitée, a woman whose head was cut clean off when she was hit by a car in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris. The woman, Sophie Blind, is, like Taubes, the daughter of a psychoanalyst, the granddaughter of a rabbi, and the estranged wife of a scholar and a rabbi. She is also the mother of mostly male children, and the lover of Gaston, Roland, Alain, Nicholas, and Ivan. In flight from her married life in New York, she has just moved to Paris with her children. She is killed before she has a chance to finish arranging the furniture in her new apartment.
In life, Sophie’s mind and her body were beholden to men. In death, her severed head is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images. Her head can detach from the first-person point of view and float into omniscience. It can leap across time and space: to her marriage in New York, to her melancholy childhood in Budapest.
more here.