Divided Island
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- 75,00 kr
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the winner of the 2022 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize: a fractal exploration of a woman's grief as she moves through disjointed segments of time.
Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, 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. Scenes and images real and imagined gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by cerebral dysrhythmia. Written in scraps and fragmented chapters, Divided Island is a nonlinear narrative best read as a poetic experience, in which the protagonist's memories and dreams recompose the world and, in doing so, trouble the very notion of the self.
This slim volume makes it abundantly clear why Daniela Tarazona belongs in the company of other Sor Juana winners like Valeria Luiselli, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Almudena Grandes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
