Critics' Opinion:
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Published Aug 2023
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"Using spare, potent prose, Nettel mines the complexities of feminism, caregiving, and what it means to love unconditionally ... This will resonate with readers." ―Publishers Weekly
"Nettel describes the realities of her characters' lives with a compassionate but unsparing eye. Every mother depicted is fully human, not selfless and saintly but a complex individual with mixed, even contradictory feelings. There's joy here and camaraderie, but there are no easy solutions. … A deeply felt, refreshingly honest story of two friends finding their ways down different paths." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Timely and nuanced questions of motherly and sibling love float through ... [a] sneakily profound book ... Nettel's prose is clear; Harvey's translation is elegant, and the stories Laura tells are straightforward." ―Booklist
"Nettel, whose earlier work has at times veered toward the phantasmagoric, is all the more haunting here for her vivid realism ... A heart-racingly intense journey, for Laura as much as Alina." ―Anderson Tepper, New York Times Book Review
"The prose, which appears in an elegant translation by Rosalind Harvey, retains a matter-of-factness, and in some places a synoptic quality that is rarely freighted with sadness or despair. … It's friendship, not crisis, that emerges as the novel's focal point. … Nettel… seems to be saying that 'normal mothers' do think ugly thoughts-or rather, that there is no such thing as a 'normal mother.' There is a strong tradition of works that connect maternal ambivalence to horror tropes-Rosemary's Baby, The Fifth Child, We Need to Talk about Kevin-but Still Born is different. … Nettel is making a case for chosen kinship." ―Sarah Resnick, London Review of Books
"It's immediately apparent why Valeria Luiselli calls Nettel 'one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature.' I can't wait to read the rest of her works in translation." ―Lit Hub
"With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence-all in language so blunt it burns." ―International Booker Prize Judges
This information about Still Born was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel's acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories (Seven Stories 2014), as "five flawless stories." A Bogotá 39 author and Granta "Best Untranslated Writer," Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.
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