Winner of the Sor Juana Inéeacute;s de la Cruz Literature Prize
"Mexican writer Tarazona's inventive English-language debut follows an author whose consciousness splits into two separate realities… [T]he free-flowing, philosophical narrative, expertly translated by Davis and Dunn, builds to a masterful and deeply meaningful conclusion about the woman’s two selves. It’s a triumph of experimentation." -Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This is a novel about the electricity that inhabits us, sometimes predictably, sometimes like a lightning storm in the brain. It is also about 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 like that sees.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Ten Planets
"Daniela Tarazona’s aesthetic appeals to the depths, to the power of evocation in literature. Magnificent, difficult, full of emotion and meaning.” —Sara Poot Herrera, Andrea Jeftanovic, and Daniel Centeno Maldonado, Jury of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize 2022
“[Tarazona] is guided by a desire to explore emotional intensity and perceptual distortion from a purely poetic perspective. And that is the best way to read and appreciate Divided Island. A close comparison (and probable influence) is Clarice Lispector, but this unusual, alluring tale of an excitable mind and the two women who share it is a startling and singular work that rewards multiple readings.” —roughghosts
"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 brain of her readers, dazzling." —Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death
The metamorphosis undertaken by Daniela Tarazona in The Animal on the Stone 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
“The book evokes voices by Clarice Lispector, one of the great influences of Tarazona, and resonances of Sylvia Plath and Daniel Paul Schreber... [A] brilliant Mexican writer.” —Hablemos
“[A] brave and risky novel, fractal and multiform, a kind of live animal difficult to grasp... The novel, despite its brevity (129 pages), is a complex and multiform artifact, whose center of gravity is the following assertion of the narrator.” —The Objective
“Closer to Lispector, Elizondo and Robbe-Grillet, as well as poetry as a concretion and reflection of the dissolution of the world, Divided Island traps us in its mystery without letting us out.” —Ana Garcíiacute;a Bergua, Letras Libres
“It is the complexity of the writing of this book, its poetic dimension, that immerses us in the anxiety of living to such a degree that we want to d
