literary fiction

Still Born

January 07, 2024

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023

Still Born is a novel about motherhood. It tells the story of mothers and their children, as well as women who choose not to have children.
 
Laura and Adina are friends. One thing they have in common is that they do not want to have children. But when Alina meets a new partner, her plans change, and now she wants to get pregnant. Laura resents her but, at the same time, tries to support her.

 

Goodreads

 

There is a word to describe someone who loses their spouse, and a word for children who are left without parents. 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.
 
Excerpt from the Book:
 
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.
 
Details:
  • author: Guadalupe Nettel
  • full title: Still Born
  • genre: literary fiction
  • format/type: bookfiction
  • country: Mexico
  • topics: #motherhood, #children, #family
  • publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • publish date: August 8, 2023
  • pages: 224

My Rating of the Book:

  • content: 💙💙💙💙

 
Prizes
  • International Booker Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2023)
 
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:

Mel

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