Still Born: Guadalupe Nettel

Product Information

Nettel interweaves the two character’s experiences effortlessly: deftly contrasting the sheer heartbreak of Alina and the impossibility of losing a child, with the amiability of Laura’s newfound relationship with neighbour and boy. I think there comes a point when all mothers realize this. We have the children that we have, not the ones we imagined we’d have, or the ones we’d have liked, and they’re the ones we end up having to contend with. 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. It’s intricately detailed, deeply felt, compelling and ultimately surprising portraits of young women….so realistic, that their stories become ours. Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born (translated by Rosalind Harvey, review copy courtesy of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Australian distributor Allen & Unwin) introduces us to Laura, a Mexican woman who has long decided that hers will be a life without children. After making the life-changing decision to have her tubes tied, her long-term relationship breaks down, leaving her to live alone. Once a globetrotter, she’s now happily working on her PhD thesis and catching up with friends, mostly those without kids.

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. How long did it take to write Still Born, and what does your writing process look like? Do you type or write in longhand? Are there multiple drafts or sudden bursts of activity? Is the plot and structure intricately mapped out in advance? Tres mujeres protagonistas que viven la maternidad de forma diferente, tres mujeres que tienen personalidad y situaciones personales completamente distintas. In Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood, which this novel explores and deepens.’ The friendship at heart of the novel – between Alina and Laura – will resonate deeply. Nettel renders their bond in all its richness and complexity.

Create free account and unlock exciting features like

I read Still Born in less than a day. It is perfect: deeply feminist, wise, funny and alive. Nettel is generous to each of her characters, and in prose that is crisp and light. I love this book.’ Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, devotes tight prose to the complicated structure of identity around being (or not being) a mother and explores the constant negotiating women must do in the process. It’s a subject that’s well-trodden, but it’s still consistently treated as a universal experience – Nettel approaches mothering with originality and oceans of empathy.’ RF: The UN says that Latin America is the most lethal place for women outside of conflict zones, with femicide and violence against women reaching epidemic proportions in Mexico. Could you explain how this influenced the shape of this book?

GN: Well, at that time I certainly didn’t know what was going to happen in the US in 2022. I couldn’t imagine how fragile the preservation of rights we have already achieved is. But I had in mind many other forms of violence: psychological, physical, political, economic; obvious and subtle, that women suffer every day. 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).Many demands weigh on mothers. They are always compared to an unattainable stereotype, one that has made women feel inadequate. Not to mention those who decide to remain childless, who are rarely represented in literature up to now. To me, Still Born is a novel which affirms female choices and which challenges patriarchal ideas of motherhood and maternal instinct.

I read Still Bornin less than a day. It is perfect: deeply feminist, wise, funny and alive. Nettel is generous to each of her characters, and in prose that is crisp and light. I love this book.’ Still Born is my second Nettel book, and where the first, The Body Where I Was Born, wasn’t really for me (thanks in part to some poor editing and a slightly clumsy ending), I found this one much more to my liking. It’s a well-paced, enjoyable story examining the concept of motherhood from several angles, often taking surprising turns. While told by Laura, Still Born often focuses on Alina and her daughter. Although pre-birth scans predicted that the baby would die soon after birth because of an underdeveloped brain, baby Inés proves to be a fighter, and Laura and her partner, Aurelio, are able to take her home. Yet what should be a happy time is simply overwhelming, and with the prospect of her child’s death always hanging over her, Alina struggles to cope, with several major consequences. Laura herself spends much of her time helping Alina and becoming a surrogate mother for Nicolás, whose actual mother, Doris, is housebound (often bedbound) through bereavement grief and trauma. She eventually confesses to Laura her struggle to raise her son alone:This highly original novel, in an excellent translation by Rosalind Harvey, pursues a range of ideas connected to children, who should have them and who should take care of them…There’s a dark undertow to Still Born that reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s novels.’ Still Born is an astonishingly elegant, intelligent, affecting novel, which has stayed in my mind from the moment I began it to long after I finished. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had encountered a work of art about ambivalence in mothering, which encompassed a true, authentic range of emotions and curiosities – vanity, aggression, jealousy and selfishness – with sanguine acceptance, as well as the beautiful and difficult project of giving and sustaining love which marks all our lives, mothers or otherwise.’ Unlike my mother’s generation, for whom it was abnormal not to have children, many women in my own age group chose to abstain. My friends, for instance, could be divided into two groups of equal size: those who considered relinquishing their freedom and sacrificing themselves for the sake of the species, and those who were prepared to accept the disgrace heaped on them by society and family as long as they could preserve their autonomy. Each one justified their position with arguments of substance. Naturally, I got along better with the second group, which included Alina.