Still Born: Guadalupe Nettel

Product Information

Touching down in far-off countries I knew very little about, crossing them by land, on foot or in ramshackle buses, and discovering their culture and cuisine were amongst the pleasures of this world which it never even occurred to me to consider giving up. Perhaps Marlene and Laura make for odd auxiliary mothers, with their dubious sense of boundaries, but “Still Born” is a book about the way caregiving can seep, imperfectly, into a person’s life. Set in Mexico City, where gender-based violence and femicide have reached epidemic proportions, the story is backdropped by feminist anger, collective action and rumbles of change.

La hija única by Guadalupe Nettel | Goodreads La hija única by Guadalupe Nettel | Goodreads

I’m not a widow, I’m more like a divorced woman who restarted her life, but I know what it is like to live in a violent relationship with someone with whom you have children.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. The writing is subtle, sharp, and beautifully rendered thanks to Rosalind Harvey’s smooth translation. But at the end of the novel, Marlene is still around, still caring for Inés, and Alina is happy about it. When I was very young and I first heard about feminism, I didn’t identify immediately with them – the “angry” feminists – but I do now, because I know exactly where this anger comes from. When I wrote this novel, thousands of women were on the streets throughout the country protesting against gender violence.

Still Born – Pages of Hackney Still Born – Pages of Hackney

I like to think that reading this book will make readers – whether male or female – question some of the practices we now take for granted as natural and unalterable, that women might broaden their perspectives on motherhood and be able to decide better what to do with their lives. The climate was effervescent, full of creativity, reflection, questioning and a sense of sorority that I’ve never experienced before. Judging by the smell, the food in his house cannot be either healthy or tasty, but the boy’s reaction is undoubtedly over the top. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Standing Heavy offers a refreshing and often caustic take on the cultural and economic consequences of an encounter between western consumerism and capitalism and the acute African sense of observation and derision.

She is the editor of the Revista de la Universidad de México of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).