Divided Island – Daniela Tarazona

[Deep Vellum; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn

A woman with a neurological issue splits into two separate people following an encephalogram. One voluntarily makes her way towards a liminal island where she knows she is going to die. The other stays behind, notices traces of her other half and swims through her memories. The lines between reality and illusion are blurred. While this is what happens in the novel, reducing it to its plot would be a betrayal of the book as a whole. This would ignore the secret rules that the novel plays by, as well as its defiance of conventional forms and modes of address.

Divided Island is Daniela Tarazona’s first work translated into English. Its translation—a collaborative effort by Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn, esteemed translators of Latin American authors such as Juan Cárdenas and Valeria Luiselli—must have been grueling. With its surreal tangents and chaotic logic, Divided Island resists being read at all, let alone translated. It’s hard to imagine the book being contained within the structured system of any language.

At the heart of Divided Island is its narrator’s neurological condition; it is the catalyst of the novel’s action, but it also informs its style. In Tarazona’s author’s note, she mentions her brain’s “excessive electrical discharges.” While this might seem vague, the brain scans printed throughout the book (Tarazona’s own) and the highly technical language that accompany them are more detailed:

Exhibited persistent hyperarousal in neural circuits controlling passive attention (and anxiety rating), congruence monitoring/encoding, assignment of meaning and valence to stimuli, nociceptive interpretation and response, and ideational integration.

Because the language is too technical for beginners in neuroscience, we have to rely on the narrator to articulate her problem. Since the narrator’s phenomenological experience is so radically affected by her condition, translation becomes an issue. There is no possible mediator to bridge the gap between the generally accepted world of logical categorizations and hers of synaptic chaos.

The opening of Divided Island feels like a crime novel. Delivered in direct address, the narrator guides you through an abandoned apartment, and the various objects scattered around that are still heavy with the impressions left on them by a woman who had just recently left unwitnessed. We are offered red herrings in the form a red car that keeps appearing, and other seemingly innocuous objects that for some reason get a lot of air time. The escaped woman is heading towards the island, which, despite the definite article preceding it, we know nothing about. Suddenly, it is revealed to us that “the woman with the restless eyes who left for the island . . . in fact, is you.”

The whole story is more or less contained in this initial setup. Besides the nameless narrator dipping into her memory, as well as her counterpart traveling towards an island where she eventually dies, not much else happens. What it means for the narrator to be split into two different people is deliberately not spelled out, adding to the confusion that functions as this book’s paradigm. Ostensibly, this is a novel, though its constant twists and turns, aphorisms and nonlinear narrative mean that this story relies on other devices beyond its plot to captivate the reader.

In Divided Island, chaos reins supreme. Subordinate clauses follow main clauses that seem unrelated—“If you see two women pushing strollers on the same street, it’s a sign of a giant mirror that reflects you thousands of times”—and we have names thrown at us which the novel seems to assume we are familiar with: “Eunice is setting the table. She’ll have dinner with Olga, your grandmother. Proper nouns are a rabbit punch.” Perhaps a consequence of the splitting that divides this novel’s narrator, Divided Island at times reads more like a game of exquisite corpse than a conventional novel. Though not immediately accessible, Tarazona’s primary commitment is to provide a testimony to her own neurodivergent experience. She acknowledges the reader’s desire to be accommodated and has no interest in doing so.

Throughout, strangers and objects evoke synchronicities that seem unconnected to the reader. For Tarazona’s narrator, one way in which these synchronicities arise is through latent meanings lurking under other people’s speech. In the narrator’s words, “language [is] forking”:

Several men in bowler hats are carrying a box . . . that happened because you looked somewhere else. . . . If a man asks you to give him money for his daughter with liver disease . . . he’s asking for spare change so a bomb doesn’t drop.

There’s a logic to the above quote, but the system they adhere to is never revealed. The relationship between cause and effect here is taken as a brute fact by our narrator, and as such these latent meanings are treated as infallible. Consequently, her other half’s journey to the island (the definite article seems only to separate this island from all those others she won’t kill herself on) is stated matter of factly—it is not something that can be bartered over. The relentless and irrational thought processes that drive Divided Island might be compared to certain intrusive thoughts that sweep us up into an irrational world we are pulled towards by anxiety or psychosis.

While half of our split narrator is rushing to the island, the other half is left behind. Her mind runs through memories from her childhood as well as memories that are not her own. Her own memories juxtapose tragically with her suicidal other half. The young girl who thought her grandmother could float exists in a sphere in which laws of nature were malleable, much like her older self in approximation to illusion. Besides her own memories, she lingers on an anecdote about her grandmother that had been passed down the generations: There’s a party in honor of Saint Michel hosted by the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio. Lee Harvey Oswald was at this party, during his stay in Mexico, and the narrator’s abuelita may have been there too. These details are “clues that pertain to part of [a] story [she’s] trying to tell.” What this story is, and how it relates to the novel at large, remains untold. While Oswald was in Mexico weeks before the assassination of JFK, in this account, flowers spring out of his forehead at Odio’s party. Truth and fantasy are so often interchanged throughout that the line begins to blur.

At times, Divided Island seems to tease the reader. Tarazona throws us breadcrumbs of conventional narrative, and logic seems to be developing as a dictating force. However, more often than not, our efforts are thwarted. Like playing a game with a smart and mischievous child who is constantly reinventing the rules, Tarazona guides us towards the signposts and obscures them over and over again.

Tarazona makes playthings out of order and rationality. Following a string of nonsensical orders and vague aphorisms, the narrator declares: “You think you need to hit upon meaning; that is, you think there are things with meaning.” Towards the end of the book, a list of facts appears, seemingly an attempt to clarify the fallacies and paradoxes that make up these pages. Despite its sensible beginnings—“a. Your grandmother didn’t walk through the walls of your house”—things soon regress again. “j. If money is exchanged, people die . . . m. if a man with thin, greasy bangs shows up at your house with a guide book . . . don’t open the door.” While logic isn’t done away with here, Tarazona presents the reader with a new logic, as if from a parallel universe. Signs have ditched the signifiers we associate them with, and cosy up with new ones we cannot wrap our heads around. Divided Island asks the reader to play by its rules, to understand that it adheres to laws that most of us are not synchronized to detect. It impersonates a conventional narrative at times, though only to cater to the reader’s expectations. It is better to succumb—perhaps reluctantly—to the story on its own terms, to appreciate the worldview on display, however confused and erratic it may seem.

Tarazona’s intention to tease readers in their pursuit of meaning makes a reading of Divided Island something akin to the early stages of learning a difficult language. A system of logic is purportedly in place, though its rules seem to be in flux. While understanding sometimes rears its head, chaos and disorder are never far away. However, to read Divided Island solely as a means to uncover its logic is to fall into Tarazona’s trap. It is legible and intriguing on its own terms, as a novel that bleeds into poetry and vice versa. Divided Island is a presentation of reality as untranslatable.

Colm McKenna is a writer from Norfolk, England.