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.’ Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico City and spent part of her childhood in the south of France. From a young age, she suffered from eye problems due to a congenital condition in one of her eyes, probably Peters' syndrome. She was consequently a victim of bullying, a fact that, according to Nettel, was one of the reasons that led her to take refuge in books and start writing. [5] She obtained a PhD in linguistics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her work has been translated to more than 17 languages. She is a contributor to various magazines and publications including as Granta, El País, The New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She is the editor of the Revista de la Universidad de México of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). 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’. Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts - Fellowships". borchardlit.org . Retrieved 26 July 2023.

Octavio Paz. Las palabras en libertad. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México. 3 November 2014. ISBN 978-607-11-3487-5. The book is for everyone — but the real gift is for young women - in their twenties and thirties - not pregnant…. Alina and Laura are old friends whose relationship is based on eschewing procreation as the be all and end all. It’s a perspective that gets increasingly complicated through pregnancy, birth, loss, a growing intimacy with the troubled son of a neighbour, unexpected resilience, the “birthing” process of writing a thesis and gradual drifting apart with a mother. Still Born is a rare thing: an unsentimental analysis of the ambivalences and moral complexity of motherhood. It is a book which demands to be discussed, at length, with friends, and I longed to do so.’In many places. My studio is actually an open room in my house, and I can really concentrate only when no one is at home. That’s why I often leave early and settle down in a café, or take a few days out of town in a quiet place where I can disconnect from everything. For the writing of this novel I accepted a short residence near Venice offered by Ca’ Foscari University, and this really helped me to finish the book. Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international award winning novels El huésped [The Guest] (2006), The Body Where I Was Born (2011), After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020) and three collections of short stories, all published by Anagrama, the most prestigious of all Spanish-language publishing houses. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El País, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she’s the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de México. Deeply intelligent, Still Born is a propulsive novel with a depth of feeling so woven into the language that it never feels worn or applied. The denatured quality of the tone means the ideas of the book – the suspicion of the body as having incompatible desires from the mind; the impulses versus the aversions to child-having; the complexities of the mother-child dynamic – all just absolutely sing. I loved it.’ When interviewed by The Booker Prizes, Nettel detailed how Still Born was based on the story of a friend and her daughter: ‘Every day, children are born with neurological conditions that set them apart from others. Their families often take these situations as misfortunes that will end forever the life they had and turn it into hell. I wanted to show, through the story of this friend of mine, that it is possible to transform this painful experience into a meaningful one.’ Do you think the author succeeded here? Did you find beauty in Alina’s experience when her daughter Inés was born with micro lissencephaly? Did it feel true to life? The friend’s tale is readable and tense, as her fetus is disabled, she carries to term in the belief that the baby won’t live, but then the baby does live, effectively changing all the ground rules of expectant motherhood. Alina, the mother, is allowed a full range of reactions to this situation, from grief and idealization of the baby-to-be, to despair afterwards, hope that the baby will die, reconciliation to loving such a frail creature. . This is certainly the book’s strongest section, though I wasn’t universally enchanted – a subplot with the nanny seemed unconvincing.

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. Rosalind Harvey skilfully translates the original Spanish into precise and plain, but deeply moving, prose. Without resorting to sentimentality, the novel charts its characters’ halting efforts to understand and comfort one another. It is a piercing reflection on the ways acts of care bind people together.’ It is a philosophical exploration about memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our pasts while making sense of our present and future. Above all, it is about time – in its fragments and in its perpetuity. The narrative is so unembellished and laced with scathing humour that it has a jarring effect, further facilitated by uneven segments and breaks – much like our thoughts, some fleeting, some resilient. La vie devant soi by Emil Ajar, because of its ironic and humorous way of criticising racism in French society and its beautiful description of how it feels to be a migrant child.

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey

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.’ Adina does want to have children. She was having trouble conceiving. She was willing to start vitro fertilization. Sara and Cariad are joined by Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction author, award-winning novelist, podcaster and journalist Emma Gannon to discuss fertility, age, choice, pigeons, loud neighbours and clichés. Guadalupe Nettel: In the beginning, my intention was to write the story of my friend and her daughter that I’ve found incredibly inspiring – both terrible and beautiful at the same time. I wanted to understand thoroughly what she went through, to recreate her experience, feelings and insights. This same sensation animates Rosalind Harvey’s delicate but enthrallingly tense translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel: an exploration of maternity, loss and refusal.

Es una novela que habla de temas que la sociedad no habla, considerados temas tabú, una historia que aunque no sea un tema que me llame mucho pero considero necesario para todos (tanto mujeres como hombres, por supuesto), quizá para ser más empáticos, tanto con mujeres que quieren ser madres como con las que no… It is a great joy. I see it as a wonderful opportunity for this novel to reach more readers, not only in the UK but around the world. For me, winning the International Booker Prize would be a dream come true. Laura, who is working on a thesis, forms an unexpected bond with a troubled neighbourhood household comprising a woman and her young son. The boy is struggling with an aggressive temper directed at his mother after the death of his father. Her strong ideas regarding children and motherhood are put to question when she starts understanding the depth, love and bond of this union.Una novela muy cortita, sencilla, pero profunda, una novela que habla sobre la maternidad desde muchos puntos de vista, pero no solo habla de maternidad, sino también de amistades, empatía… Un genitore si nutre di piccole e grandi ricompense emotive ed ogni giorno si rigioca tutto e come un lancio di dadi.

For readers of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, Still Born is a profound novel about motherhood, creativity, and the power of friendship and community to make caretaking easier from “one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature” (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive).

In many respects the novel is a gripping and powerful exploration of motherhood, and indeed of what it means to live. The truth was they were both inept, but it is always easier to blame others for what we cannot tolerate in ourselves, what we cannot forgive ourselves for’. 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.