The sun gives me comfort. The temperature outside calibrates the temperature of my body, and I know I am immortal when I'm on a rock.
After Irma's mother dies, she boards a plane to the coast. Soon she is consumed by strange dreams and irrational fears, and her body begins to transform in ways as unexpected as they are natural. The skin over her joints grows thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and the border between reality and delirium becomes first elastic, then irrelevant. As the world around her tips out of balance-the weather turning volatile, strangers issuing cryptic warnings-she returns again and again to the rock where she undergoes metamorphosis: a series of radical mutations that enable her to survive.
Elemental and prophetic, intimate and universal, The Animal on the Rock bears witness to the terror and magnificence of being a child, a parent, a changing animal. A profoundly biological and introspective novel that lies somewhere between clinical record and fever dream.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Daniela Tarazona's aesthetic appeals to the evocative power of literature. Magnificent, exacting, rich with emotion and meaning." -Jury of the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize 2022
"[The Animal on the Rock] seems to me to be one of the most original prose works of the Mexican century so far." -Christopher Dominguez Michael, El Universal
"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." -Alvaro 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 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 with that lucidity sees." -Yuri Herrera, author of Ten Planets
"After the death of her mother, a woman named Irma holes up on a faraway beach to grieve and, the process, undergoes a supernatural metamorphosis in the Mexican author's latest." -The Millions
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 178 mm
Breite: 127 mm
Dicke: 11 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-64605-397-1 (9781646053971)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of Divided Island, winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Ines 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 Americas Prize in 2013. In 2020, the book Clarice Lispector: La mirada en el jardin (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 Cardenas'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, Maria Bastaros, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerda, and Cristian Perfumo.
