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In his novel Always bornpreselected for the 2023 International Booker PrizeThe Mexican author Guadalupe Netl on a fuse under the theme of maternity. “Being a mother means worrying for someone else,” said her narrator Laura, explaining why she preferred to stay childless.
Mothers – and the work of parenting, more generally – are in good place in Nettel's latest book, a disturbing collection of news in which comforting conventions of family life are examined, disputed and subverted.
“Having children is always waiting for someone,” said the narrator to “play with fire”, in which an idyllic family escapes the Mexican countryside becomes sour. This is one of the two stories linked to the pandemic in this volume.
The other is “the torpor”, a disaster -dystopian tale in a permanently locked world in which the free press has been abolished (journalists would be “very active agents of the infection”) and information bulletins claim that climate change is “a superstition held by uninformed people”. The protagonist is a teacher who has never met her students online (“this helps to avoid one of the additional attachments like what we saw”). In these circumstances, sleep offers the best escape – and almost becomes an act of rebellion. “In dreams,” said the narrator, “I'm not married, or not always, and I don't have a family either … Dreams are the most interesting thing that happens in my life.”
The absence of maternal affection is visible in “the orphans' scholarship”, in which the protagonist remembers having grown up “in a public institution where I shared a room with fifteen other children who cried, like me, in their absences at night whenever they thought of the families they had lost or those they had wanted”. This education explains one of the narrator's bindings: “Little things intrigue me more than real mothers, looking for the idealized version that I have always had.”
In “Impression”, a visit to the hospital leads to the fortuitous meeting of a young woman with a distant and inexplicably banished parent of family events. “I had read something in the footsteps left in our memory by the touch and the smell of those with whom we come into contact in the first years of our life,” she writes. “”FootprintI think it's called. According to the article, this body brand is the place where family ties are cemented. The true nature of these family ties, however, often hides darker corners.
“La Porte Rose” is one of the lightest stories in the collection. When a new neighborhood arrival disrupts its marital routine, a slightly dissatisfied husband discovers the wisdom of the secure adage: pay attention to what you want. “When I remember that day,” said the man, “that's all I can't do to blush and feel flooded by a deep nostalgia, because since then, my life has never been the same again.”
Another unhappy husband is at the center of “Life elsewhere”, whose title echoes a line in a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. A failed actor living in Barcelona becomes obsessed with the tenants of an apartment that he and his wife could not obtain. He covets – and ends up dressing by proxy – the life of a more prosperous compatriot.
The titular story focuses on the friendship between the nameless narrator – a young girl – and the Camilo, the son of Uruguayan political refugees living in Mexico in the 1970s. The title is a reference to the birds of Albatros which were destroyed out of course and find themselves alone and far from their natural habitats.
Oscillating between realism and dark fantasy, and impeccably translated by Rosalind Harvey, the stories in Accidental are delicious and disturbing, and confirm Nettel as one of the best Mexican writers of her generation.
Accidental by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, Fitzcarraldo £ 12.99 / Bloomsbury $ 25.99, 128 pages
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