The Animals Within

Shortly after the birth of her child, motherhood draws a young woman into an existential crisis. Love for the baby doesn’t come; the alienation, despair and exhaustion are total. In a fragmented form and with penetrating insights, ‘The Animals Within’ describes her struggles. Sleepless nights, endless crying and loneliness have completely taken over the protagonist’s life. She recognizes less and less of herself in the woman who cares for her child, and this results in a dual narrative perspective. ‘She’ is the mother figure, trying at all costs to function, while ‘I’ is the woman who increasingly withdraws, wanders astray and takes flight.

‘The Animals Within’ is a clever experimental exploration of the destabilizing experience of postpartum depression, told through a woman for whom the normal world becomes incomprehensible. The book is a rich network of associations, from Virgil to Joan Didion to gruesome images from the animal world, such as octopus mothers who destroy themselves after their eggs have hatched. 

In extraordinary and extremely precise images, Mariën seeks meaning and language for an experience that she is fighting against. Her investigation is given free rein in the form of this novel, by means of a fragmentary structure and free layout. As in Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and other mythical stories of the underworld, every chapter signifies a new gateway in the descent into hell, and another step towards loss of identity. Pushing shame aside, in this book the ‘I’ addresses her child: ‘Because you need to know and I need to understand.’