Guadalupe Nettel
Guadalupe Nettel (born 1973) is a Mexican writer. She was born in Mexico City and obtained a PhD in linguistics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has published in several genres, both fiction and non-fiction.Nettel is a prolific author and a regular contributor to both Spanish- and French-language magazines, including Letras Libres, Hoja por hoja, L'atelier du roman, and L'inconvénient. In 2006 she was voted one of thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogotá Hay Festival. She has lived in Montreal and Paris, and is now based in Barcelona, where she works as a translator and holds writing seminars and a workshop on Potential Literature (based on the French Oulipo). She is the author of Juegos de artificio [False Games], Les jours fossiles [Fossil Days], Pétalos y otras historias incómodas [Petals and other Awkward Stories], and El huésped [The Host], and the recipient of the Premio Herralde, third place, for El huésped, and the 2008 Premio Antonin Artaud and the 2007 Gilbert Owen Short Story Prize in Mexico for Pétalos.Guadalupe Nettel’s stories have been described as “marvellous” by the distinguished Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vázquez, and the critic Juan Ignacio Boido has praised Nettel’s creation of “a universe where Roberto Bolaño’s visceral poets rub shoulders with the fragile but unbreakable women of Haruki Murakami.”
Still Born
Guadalupe Nettel
Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
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 complications arise in Alina's pregnancy 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.
La hija única
Guadalupe Nettel
Tres mujeres enfrentadas a la maternidad. Tres maneras de afrontarla. Una intensa y deslumbrante novela sobre la familia en el mundo actual.
Poco después de cumplir los ocho meses de embarazo, a Alina le anuncian que su hija no podrá sobrevivir al nacimiento. Ella y su compañero emprenden entonces un doloroso pero también sorprendente proceso de aceptación y duelo. Ese último mes de gestación se convierte para ellos en una extraña oportunidad para conocer a esa hija a la que tanto trabajo les cuesta renunciar. Laura, la gran amiga de Alina, refiere el conflicto de esta pareja, mientras reflexiona sobre el amor y su lógica a veces incomprensible, pero también sobre las estrategias que los seres humanos inventamos para superar la frustración. Laura nos cuenta igualmente la historia de su vecina Doris, madre soltera de un niño encantador con problemas de comportamiento.
Escrita con una sencillez solo aparente, La hija única es una novela profunda y llena de sabiduría sobre la maternidad, sobre su negación o su asunción; sobre las dudas, incertidumbres e incluso sentimientos de culpa que la envuelven; sobre las alegrías y las angustias que la acompañan. Es también una novela sobre tres mujeres –Laura, Alina, Doris– y los vínculos –de amistad, de amor– que establecen entre ellas. Una novela sobre las formas diversas que puede tomar la familia en el mundo actual.
The Body Where I Was Born
Guadalupe Nettel
The novel of an unconventional childhood in the seventies by one of the most talked-about writers of new Mexican fiction.
From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood—in which she was born with a birth defect into a family intent on fixing it—having somehow survived the emotional havoc she went through. And survive she did, but not unscathed. This intimate narrative echoes the voice of the narrator's younger self, a sharp, sensitive girl keen to life's hardships.
With bare language and smart humor, both delicate and unafraid, the narrator strings a strand of touching moments together to create a portrait of an unconventional childhood that crushed her, scarred her, mended her, tore her apart and ultimately made her whole.
After the Winter
Guadalupe Nettel
A shy young Mexican woman moves to Paris to study literature. Cecilia has few friends, and a morbid fascination with watching the funerals taking place in Père-Lachaise cemetery outside her apartment. She suddenly strikes up a close relationship with her neighbour, a sickly young man who shares her interest in death and believes we can communicate with the dead. After coming to entirely depend on him for company and routine, Cecilia is left devastated by his decision to go to Sicily for his health, and is left alone in an unfriendly city once more.Claudio, meanwhile, lives in New York with the submissive, quiet, but very wealthy Ruth. She makes few demands of him, while acquiescing to all his desires and indulging his obsessive, misogynistic nature. He meets Cecilia by chance when visiting a friend in Paris and their two very different worlds collide with transformative consequences.With startling intensity, humour and insight, Nettel conjures a dark fable about obsession, denial and our modern ability to reach out across the globe in search of love.Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
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