Mexican literature always had, and maintains, a multitude of battering rams, writers of very diverse backgrounds that enriched and still magnify that intangible heritage of letters.
Guadeloupe Nettel It is one of the great current Mexican storytellers. From the inexhaustible Elena Poniatowska but also Juan Villoro, Alvaro Enrigue o Jorge Volpi. Each one with his own particular "demons" (demons because there is nothing more motivating to write than a point of diabolical temptation, an "insane" taste for the strangeness with which every good writer strips the world in its miseries).
Nettel is one more example in the profession of writing as a full, deterministic vocation. Because both academic training and dedication to narrative have passed with that parallel becoming of someone who enjoys an iron will, forged from a powerful internal breath.
Everything in Nettel finds that ideal way towards the end why. To train in literature, begin by writing stories and end up breaking into novels or essays with the self-sufficiency of someone who already knows himself or herself in the essential arts. So today we can only enjoy his books.
Top 3 recommended novels of Guadalupe Nettel
The guest
To discover my theory that this author came to the novel with her homework well done and that mastery that the virguerÃa of genius allows, there is nothing better than delving into this debut work. A balanced explosion, like an explosive cocktail, between existentialism, intimacy and imagination.
On some occasions, faced with unexpected situations, we may feel that we react as if they were not us. Exposure to the abnormal, to an atypical phenomenon for our composition of time and place to show in us a host lodged in our brain, capable of directing us completely, from voice to gestures...
The strange story of a girl inhabited internally by a disturbing being, perhaps imaginary, perhaps not. Ana has a silent fight against that Siamese sister, until the guest begins to manifest in their family environment in a devastating way.
Around that presence the events of a life are forged, among them family tragedies, and her existence as an adult. Ana knows that, sooner or later, a doubling will occur in her.
This novel describes a long goodbye to the world of sight and an encounter with the universe of the blind, but also with the underground and most remote face of Mexico City. The characters, including the city, unfold in a confusion of reflections, moving between the superficial and the deep, the conscious and the unconscious, the dark and the bright, without ever knowing the territory we are on.
They are people who, due to a physical or psychological defect, do not find a place in the world and organize themselves into parallel groups that impose their own values ​​and understand its rare beauty. The author explores these universes guided by an intuition: in the aspects that we refuse to see of the world - or of ourselves - the guidelines that help us cope with existence are hidden.
The guest was the first and disturbing novel of which, with the passage of books and awards, has become one of the voices with the most present –and future– of the narrative in Spanish.
The only child
Nothing more loved than what was lost, as Serrat would say. But nothing more desired than what is not yet known (or nothing more beautiful than what I have never had, as Serrat finally ends up).
The anticipated that never becomes, the worst that can happen to us. Because our dreams and desires are built on the imagined; our ways to escape a little from ourselves. Even more so if it is a question of knowing the face of a child and getting closer to discovering his breathing while he sleeps.
Shortly after reaching eight months of pregnancy, Alina is told that her daughter will not be able to survive the birth. She and her partner then undertake a painful, but also surprising process of acceptance and mourning. That last month of pregnancy becomes for them a strange opportunity to meet that daughter whom they have so much trouble giving up.
Laura, Alina's great friend, refers to this couple's conflict, while reflecting on love and its sometimes incomprehensible logic, but also on the strategies that human beings invent to overcome frustration. Laura also tells us the story of her neighbor Doris, a single mother of a charming boy with behavior problems.
Written with only apparent simplicity, The only child It is a profound novel full of wisdom about motherhood, about its denial or its assumption; about the doubts, uncertainties and even feelings of guilt that surround her; about the joys and heartaches that accompany it. It is also a novel about three women –Laura, Alina, Doris– and the bonds –of friendship, of love– that they establish between them. A novel about the various forms that the family can take in today's world.
After winter
One of those novels that undresses us all. An exposure to the great Nettel light of our bodies, embodied as readers in the characters of this story.
The stripping to which we are subjected is produced as a literary alchemy that sublimates us, that manages to elevate us towards that perspective that contemplates the life of others and ends up living it.
Because literature is empathy and, used in a masterful way as in this novel, it also manages to offer us an almost divine power to observe other people's lives and live them.
Claudio is Cuban, lives in New York and works in a publishing house. Cecilia is Mexican, lives in Paris and is a student. In his past there are memories of Havana and the pain over the loss of his first girlfriend, and in his present, the complicated relationship with Ruth.
In her past there is a difficult adolescence, and in her present, the relationship with Tom, a boy with delicate health with whom she shares her fondness for cemeteries. It will be during Claudio's trip to Paris when their destinies intersect.
While Claudio and Cecilia describe in detail their day to day in Paris and New York, both reveal their neuroses, their passions, their phobias and the reminiscences of the past that dictate their fears, giving an account of how they met and the circumstances that led to them. they led to intermittently liking, loving, and hating each other.
After winter, he shows with an incisive, sometimes humorous and sometimes moving style, the mechanisms of love relationships, as well as their various ingredients.
With a background soundtrack featuring Nick Drake, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett or The Hours of Philip Glass, the love story between Claudio and Cecilia is part of a larger story that covers an important period of their lives. stocks.
Each one continues their journey drawing a map made of encounters and absences, of searches and uncertainties, of longings and regrets; Each one, forced by his circumstances, descends into the abyss of his mental defeats in search of the keys to relate to others as well as to himself, and to build, if possible, his own oasis of happiness.
Guadalupe Nettel has written a resounding novel, of unusual ambition and intensity, which delves masterfully into her recognizable universe, that of the beings that inhabit the margins, the estrangement, the anomaly. With it, he definitively establishes himself as one of the essential voices of the current Latin American narrative.
Other recommended books by Guadalupe Nettel
the wanderers
Due to the twists and turns of this world, sometimes there are those who lose the North and their horizon. Because twists bring changes. And while some always recover the same position when reaching 360 degrees, others never return to what they were. Characters turned to the antipodes of existence.
In one of the stories collected in this volume, the protagonist explains her encounter with an albatross, that solitary bird with its majestic flight to which Baudelaire dedicated a poem. She and her father come across what they call "lost albatross" or "wandering albatross", birds that, due to overexertion due to lack of wind, go crazy, become disoriented and end up reaching places far removed from their natural habitat. .
The protagonists of these eight stories are each in their own way "wandering." Some unexpected event has broken the routines of their lives, has forced them to leave their usual space and move through strange territories. For example, the girl who one day meets an uncle in a hospital who has been outlawed for years in her family for something that no one wants to say; the frustrated actor who inadvertently begins a different life in the house of an old classmate for whom things have gone better; the woman who lives with her children in a dying world where it is better to be asleep than awake, or the narrator of the magnificent story "The Pink Door", who discovers the solution to her unsatisfactory family life in a lonely street.
These stories, which move between realism and fantasy, confront their characters with that obsession that our society has carefully chiselled: that of success and failure, and they give an account of the mastery that Guadalupe Nettel has achieved in this genre.
