The Body Where I Was Born

This was my first encounter with the work of Guadalupe Nettel, and I was pleasantly surprised. The Body Where I Was Born is a story about an unconventional, different childhood. The novel is autobiographical and tells about the author’s growing up in Mexico in the seventies.

The narrator shares her childhood story with the therapist. The novel begins when the narrator is six. The girl resents her mother for telling her that she is like a cockroach (commenting on her posture) and for forcing her to wear a patch over her eye to improve her vision due to a birth defect in her eye.

In her childhood years, she saw and learned about things other children did not. Her very liberal parents taught her many things that other children were not familiar with, like intimacy, reproduction, etc. Besides that, she even spent a brief time at a commune, and her parents often socialized with other couples who were in polygamous relationships and didn’t hide it.

 

Goodreads

Details:

• author: Guadalupe Nettel
• full title: The Body Where I Was Born
• genre: literary fiction, memoir
• country: Mexico
  
• format/type: booknonfiction
• topics: #unconventionalchildhood
  
• publisher: Seven Stories Press
  
• publish date: June 16, 2015
• pages: 175
  

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙

About the Author: 

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.”

Other Works by this Author:

• Still Born