Guadalupe Nettel

Rosalind Harvey

Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel, treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood – whether or not to have children – with the intelligence and originality that have won her international acclaim. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When Alina’s daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. 

In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women. 

Still Born

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize A profound novel about motherhood, friendship, and the power of community from “one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature” (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive). Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own. Alina's pregnancy shakes the women's lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Inspirada en la infancia de la autora, el cuerpo en que nací es la historia de una niña con un defecto de nacimiento en un ojo. Su vida, durante los años setenta, se ve influida por su escasa visión, pero también por la ideología dominante en esa época: e

El cuerpo en que nací

The first novel to appear in English by one of the most talked-about and critically acclaimed writers of new Mexican fiction. From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood--in which she was born with an abnormality in her eye into a family intent on fixing it. In a world without the time and space for innocence, the narrator intimately recalls her younger self--a fierce and discerning girl open to life's pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy. With raw language and a brilliant sense of humor, both delicate and unafraid, Nettel strings together hard-won, unwieldy memories--taking us from Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence, France, then back home again--to create a portrait of the artist as a young girl. In these pages, Nettel's art of storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality. "Nettel's eye...gives rise to a tension, subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an uncomfortable reality, disquieting, even disturbing--a gaze that illuminates her prose like an alien sun shining down on our world." --Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd "It has been a long time since I've found in the literature of my generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of Guadalupe Nettel." --Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling "Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings...and painstakingly examines the intimacies of her soul." --Magazine Littéraire "Guadalupe Nettel's storytelling power is majestic."--Typographical Era In Praise of Natural Histories "Five flawless stories..." --The New York Times "Nettel's stories are as atmospheric and emotionally battering as Checkhov's."--Asymptote

The Body Where I Was Born

En estas cinco narraciones intensas y de atmósfera delicada, Guadalupe Nettel nos propone un cruce de caminos entre el mundo animal y el universo humano para hablar de temas tan naturales como la ferocidad de la vida en pareja, la maternidad --cuando es deseada y cuando no lo es--, las crisis existenciales de la adolescencia o los lazos inimaginables que pueden establecerse entre dos enamorados. Su mirada proyecta lo subterráneo y lo secreto de sus personajes, lo anómalo, lo inconfesable. Los cuentos de El matrimonio de los peces rojos son espacios magistralmente construidos en los que nos preguntamos cómo y en qué momento se fraguan en nosotros las decisiones más íntimas y soterradas, aquellas que, sin sospecharlo, marcarán de manera definitiva nuestra existencia.

El matrimonio de los peces rojos

One of the most important and watched writers of today. Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. "Ptosis" is told from the point of view of the son of a photographer whose work involves before and after pictures of patients undergoing cosmetic eye surgeries. In "Through Shades," a woman studies a man interacting with a woman through the windows of the apartment across the street. In one of the longer stories, "Bonsai," a man visits a garden, and comes to know a gardener, during the period of dissolution of his marriage. "The Other Side of the Dock" describes a young girl in search of what she terms "True Solitude," who finds a fellow soul mate only to see the thing they share lose its meaning. In "Petals," a woman's odor drives a man to search for her, and even to find her, without quenching the thirst that is his undoing. And the title story, "Bezoar," is an intimate journal of a patient writing to a doctor. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.

And Other Unsettling Stories

Bezoar

Claudio is Cuban, lives in New York and works at a publishing house. Cecilia is Mexican, lives in Paris and is a student. He keeps the memories of his past in Havana; now he has to face a complicated relationship with Ruth. She remembers her tough teenage years; now she has a relationship with Tom, a frail health boy. It will be during a trip to Paris when Claudio and Cecilia's destinies intersect.

Después del invierno

Bestiario sentimentale

La figlia unica

Pétalos y otras historias incómodas

“This taut, atmospheric novel is an ode to the complicated heartbreak of loving what will forever be just out of reach.” —Laura van den Berg, award-winning author of The Third Hotel Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss. “Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A luminous writer of dark humor and wild insight. After the Winter is a deeply compassionate story about love, about how hard it is to know another—let alone ourselves—in all our strange glory. Yet, in the end, it is also a story about how essential it is, in spite of the pitfalls, to try.”—Nick Flynn, award-winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City “Insightful and painfully poignant…examines the bonds between people, the degrees of intimacy and commitment we allow ourselves and the toll isolation can take upon the soul.” —Glasgow Herald

After the Winter

Eight powerful stories about characters confronted with the unknown and with their own fears... In one of these stories, the protagonist explains her encounter with an albatross, that solitary bird with majestic flight to which Baudelaire dedicated a poem. She and her father come across what they call "lost albatross" or "wandering albatross", birds that, due to overexertion due to lack of wind, go crazy, become disoriented and end up reaching places far away from their natural habitat. The protagonists of these eight stories are each in their own way "wandering." Some unexpected event has broken the routines of their lives, has forced them to leave their usual space and move through strange territories.

Los Divagantes

Il corpo in cui sono nata

Inspirado na infância da autora, O corpo em que nasci conta a história de uma menina que nasceu com uma deficiência no olho, uma mancha que borra o que ela enxerga à sua volta. Mais que isso: imprime nas coisas, nos outros, nas experiências, as digitais de seu próprio corpo, estranho e marginal. Narrado em forma de solilóquio no divã de uma psicanalista – neutra e invisível – este é o romance de formação de Guadalupe Nettel. Criada em um ambiente progressista no México, estrangeira em uma periferia de Aix-en-Provence e dona de um imaginário peculiar, Guadalupe arquiteta sua prosa com introspecção e uma naturalidade desconcertantes. Ao desfiar suas memórias mais íntimas numa linguagem que às vezes soa como um relatório, Nettel se afasta da ideia de catarse e se aproxima de uma investigação de seu próprio território, este corpo que a localiza e a faz existir no mundo, geografia irregular e palpitante com a qual ela tenta se reconciliar. O corpo em que nasci pertence a coleção Otra Língua, organizada por Joca Terron.

O corpo em que nasci

Les deux amies s’étaient fait un serment : jamais elles ne se laisseraient aller à être mères. Impossible d’imaginer renoncer à leur liberté pour un enfant. Et pourtant, un jour, Alina décide de tomber enceinte. Laura vacille, accablée à l’idée de voir son amie renoncer à leurs idéaux. La réalité, elle, se chargera de les balayer tout à fait ; la venue de l’enfant d’Alina, la petite Inès, s’accompagne de terribles surprises. Tandis que la jeune femme découvre une maternité à laquelle elle n’était pas préparée, c’est avec l’un de ses petits voisins que Laura tisse des liens aussi étonnants que profonds. Et alors que la vie de ces deux amies se trouve bouleversée à tout jamais, de drôles d’oiseaux élisent domicile sur le balcon de Laura. Au cœur de L’Oiseau rare, il y a le pouvoir saisissant des enfants : ceux que l’on choisit d’avoir ou ceux qui arrivent dans nos vies, ceux que l’on regarde grandir, ceux que l’on aime et ceux auxquels on renonce. Avec la singularité qu’on lui connaît, Guadalupe Nettel nous parle ainsi des mille façons d’être mère, de combats, de drames et de la manière dont nous apprenons à aimer.

Guadalupe Nettel

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