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

Marion

 Distance is unerring proof of friendship. Occasionally it lays waste to it, as a frost can do to a good harvest. But this wasn't what happened between Alina and me. We continued to write and to call each other often, informing one another of the most noteworthy episodes in our lives - the appearance of Aurelio in hers, her father's ill health, my choice of thesis topic

- and so the affection we already had for one another was steadily reinforced.

There is a word to describe someone who loses their spouse, and a word for children who are left without parents. There is no word, however, for a parent who loses their child. Unlike previous centuries in which child mortality was very high, it's not normal for this to occur in our time. It is something so feared, so unacceptable, that we have chosen not to name it.

We daughters have a tendency to see in our mother's mistakes the source of all our problems, and our mothers tend to consider our defects as proof of a possible failure. 

Then I thought that love is frequently illogical, incomprehensible. Many of us do the same when we fall in love with someone who is very ill, or who lives far away, or with someone involved in another love story that has no room for us. Who has not plunged headlong into an irreconcilable love affair knowing it has no future, and clinging to a glimmer of hope as flimsy as a blade of grass?

Pourquoi durer est-il mieux que brûler? wondered Roland Barthes, sceptically. Love and common sense are not always compatible. In general, one tends to choose intensity no matter how little time it lasts, and in spite of all that it puts at risk.

Still Born quotes

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