Divided island

Daniela Tarazona, 1975-

Book - 2024

"A narrative and poetic experience in which body, memory and delirium clash to recompose the world and, therefore, the identity of the self. Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for an encephalogram, which will diagnose her cerebral dysrhythmia, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind and follows the trail of her suicidal other half. The focus of this non-linear novel is not the sequence of events, but the writing used to describe those events in brief chapters and fragments. Divided Island is a fractal novel, best read as a poetic experience; the text's importance lies not ...in the plot but in how its language is crafted into a collection of scenes, moments, memories, dreams, and images the gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by dysrhythmia"--

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Novels
Published
Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing 2024.
Language
English
Spanish
Main Author
Daniela Tarazona, 1975- (author)
Other Authors
Lizzie Davis, 1993- (translator), Kevin Gerry Dunn
Edition
First US edition
Physical Description
pages cm
ISBN
9781646053148
  • Careful with the Pearls
  • Superimpositions
  • The Woman on the Island
  • You Move in that Direction
  • Tableau of Wonders
  • She Goes Toward the Island
  • A Flower on his Brow
  • The Woman from the Story
  • How it Happened
  • The Beauty of Light is Your Face
  • The Roundness of an Egg
  • Easter
  • No One is Normal Up Close
  • The Writer, Pursued
  • Her Brain Scan
  • Epilepsy
  • The Hen with a Scar on Its Head
  • Her Cleansing
  • The Woman Who Left for the Island was You
  • End of the World
  • Author's Note
  • Biographical Information
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Mexican writer Tarazona's inventive English-language debut follows an author whose consciousness splits into two separate realities. The break takes place after the unnamed protagonist, who is grieving her mother's recent death and whose brain feels as if it's full of stalactites, is found to have abnormal brain rhythms. One version of the woman returns to her daily routine in Mexico City, while the other runs away to a remote island, where she plans to end her life ("It doesn't matter that you each inhabit a different body," Tarazona writes. "Conjugations are irrelevant"). Interspersed throughout both narrative strands are dreamlike and at times apocryphal stories about the woman's mother and grandmother, who practiced yoga together for decades with a powerful swami who might have been a "con man." While readers may feel disoriented at the outset, the 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. (Apr.)

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