About this item
Highlights
- With a precise and visceral style, Daniela Tarazona presents the clinical course of a radical mutation--a change whose physiological symptoms emerge from a more intimate evolution.
- About the Author: Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of Divided Island, winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize and published by Deep Vellum in 2024.
- 100 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
"With a precise and visceral style, Daniela Tarazona presents the clinical course of a radical mutation - a change whose physiological symptoms emerge from a more intimate evolution. After the death of her mother, Irma decides to take a plane and hole up on a faraway beach. Through the course of her grief, the protagonist's body, her instincts, and her perception, begin to experience a transformation as unexpected as it is natural. The skin over her joints become thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and she spends more and more time bathing in the hot sun. In these pages, Tarazona manages to address the perennial literary theme of metamorphosis, without relying on simple fantasy or didactic symbolism. More than a fable or a supernatural diversion, The Animal on the Rock is a profoundly biological and introspective novel with universal resonances"--Book Synopsis
With a precise and visceral style, Daniela Tarazona presents the clinical course of a radical mutation--a change whose physiological symptoms emerge from a more intimate evolution.
After the death of her mother, Irma decides to take a plane and hole up on a faraway beach. Through the course of her grief, the protagonist's body, her instincts, and her perception, begin to experience a transformation as unexpected as it is natural. The skin over her joints become thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and she spends more and more time bathing in the hot sun.
In these pages, Tarazona manages to address the perennial literary theme of metamorphosis, without relying on simple fantasy or didactic symbolism. More than a fable or a supernatural diversion, The Animal on the Rock is a profoundly biological and introspective novel with universal resonances.
Review Quotes
"I don't think that there is now, in Mexico, a literary mind more original than Daniela Tarazona's. Her books are as disconcerting as they are brilliant. Her ability to generate powerful, enigmatic images in the brains of her readers, dazzling." --Álvaro Enrigue, author of You Dreamed of Empires
"The metamorphosis undertaken by Daniela Tarazona in The Animal on the Rock reaches its full form here, which, paradoxically, is not a form but rather its dissolution: a way of disappearing in words. The author has become writing. In her place, another woman who is pure language has left for an island with the intention of committing suicide. Or rather, a woman--the same, another, which one, none--has not left for an island... I happen to understand and not understand this book. But it is in what I do not understand where I can best experience its atrocious lucidity as a chill of beauty and truth." --Luis Felipe Fabre, author of Recital of the Dark Verses
"This is a novel about the electricity that inhabits us, sometimes predictably, sometimes like a lightning storm in the brain. It is alsoabout a writer's relationship with her mother and about how fragile memory and language are. But above all it is about the terrible lucidity that comes with being abnormal, and how poetry is the only science that allows us to understand what someone with that lucidity sees."--Yuri Herrera, author of Ten Planets
About the Author
Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of Divided Island, winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize and published by Deep Vellum in 2024. In 2012, she published the novel El beso de la liebre (Alfaguara), which was shortlisted for the Las Américas Prize in 2013. In 2020, the book Clarice Lispector: La mirada en el jardín (Lumen) was published, co-written by Tarazona and Nuria Mel. Her work has been translated into English and French. She has been a fellow of Mexico's Young Artists program and is currently a member of the FONCA fund's National Network of Artists. In 2011, she was recognized as one of twenty-five Latin American literary secrets by the Guadalajara International Book Fair. The Animal on the Rock was her debut novel, and is her second to be translated into English.
Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and former senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas's Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces; Elena Medel's The Wonders, co-translated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.
Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant) and work by Paul B. Preciado, María Bastarós, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerdà, and Cristian Perfumo.