The sensation of isolation and alienation, the problem of the ‘modern man,’ is one of the most common in our last century of literature. The previous centuries’ explorations of religious and political problems gave way to an increasing concern with the individual, the personal unit divorced from all systems and communities. These concerns led to stories that focus on the struggle for personal definition and the internally divided individual’s relation to larger forces. Then, when the individual finds little relation—alienation. This alienation can even take form in the disconnection from our own physical bodies. In The Animal on the Rock, this representation comes in the form of the animal: the sensual, the instinctual, the elements all too often lost in the mechanisms of human society and the expectations and social laws imposed by others.
Daniela Tarazona is a Mexican writer and journalist. The Animal on the Rock is her first novella, originally published in 2008, and now fully translated into English for the first time. This work, a story of transformation into an animal—dissected with an existential emphasis—is a natural descendant of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Another of Tarazona’s most direct influences is the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, author of the 1960s classic The Passion According to G.H. Tarazona has written several essays on Lispector, whose style shows clearly in The Animal on the Rock. This style may be described briefly as follows: a protagonist gives a monologue on the actions and impressions of their life, hyperfixating on existential and poetically expressed thoughts which verge increasingly into the mystical.
This transformation is set into motion (if such a subterranean evolution can be traced) to the death of the narrator’s mother. A series of premonitions, internal and external, inspires the protagonist to take a plane—somewhere. Arriving at the unstated destination, the protagonist goes to a beach and lies on a rock. Her skin has already turned a shade of green and developed a hard, scaly quality. An unnamed man and his pet anteater, Lysander, come across the narrator. After a brief interaction, they invite the narrator to live with them in their home by the ocean.
Here we can safely leave off a description of the plot. Despite the narrative’s trajectory so far, this is not a visually vibrant magical realist piece, a la One Hundred Years of Solitude. The focus of Animal on the Rock remains very personalized throughout, concerned largely with the protagonist’s inner sensations, external transformation, and her ambiguous relations with Lysander and a series of unnamed, largely indistinct humans. The narrator becomes subsumed in the animal world, and the short interactions that make up the rest of the novella will likely be interpreted in different ways by different readers. This is not to say the plot is fundamentally unreal and difficult to discern, such as in The Orange Eats Creeps. Rather, here the main vehicle of momentum is a physical transformation into a reptilian form, and the various external episodes connected with this vehicle do not provide any clear, objective meaning.
A craving—and fulfillment?—of timelessness pervades, such as when the protagonist considers: “My transformation brings strength; when it’s complete, nothing on earth will be capable of affecting me. My line will survive forever, or at least go unbroken for a vast and unimaginable length of time.” Her grand reaction against death recurs through the novella, beginning with the mother’s stated death, and the implied deaths of a sister as well as a former lover of the protagonist. The story’s symbolic transformation can be linked to the sense of the reptile as ancient, and reduction to the “lizard brain” in moments of extreme shock and stress.
Some comparison may also be drawn with Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Seascape, where anthropomorphic lizard people emerge from the ocean and onto a beach, merging speech with instinct. The narrator of Animal on the Rock, too, remains capable of speech and thought all the way to the end. Her journey is not a sinking into unconsciousness, but some alignment of human and animal nature, including the desire for procreation. Life responds to death with new birth. Eventually, an egg is formed. Reaching unimaginably further than human laws, the cycle of life—that all-powerful, universal, blind force, that which imposes continuity as the highest value—goes on.
FICTION
The Animal on the Rock
By Daniela Tarazona
Deep Vellum Publishing
Published September 9, 2025
