The original title of Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel is La hija única, or “the only child,” though única may also be rendered as “unique.” The title offers at least two resonances. The same pertains to the multivalent title Still Born – a child dead at delivery — but then also “still” as “nevertheless,” alive despite the odds against. The title for anglophones may be one of Rosalind Harvey’s marked departures from literal translation in her brisk and fluid version of Still Born – and it seems most apt to me, since the narrative itself transports its protagonist, Laura, from a fixed attitude to a more speculative perspective.
“For years I tried to convince my girlfriends that procreating was a hopeless mistake,” Laura says at the outset. Now in her early 30’s, she had “turned up at my gynaecologist’s office without an appointment and asked him to tie my tubes” during (and thus ending) a relationship with a man who aspired to fatherhood. Laura and her close friend Alina had shared an aversion to motherhood, “what we used to call, looking knowingly at each other, ‘the human shackles.’”
Laura is now working on her doctoral thesis in Mexico City and living in an apartment next to one rented by a single mother, Doris, and her son, Nicolas; Doris is a depressive living in the aftermath of a brutalizing experience with her husband, and her son punishes her with tantrums that Alina hears through the thin walls. Then Alina tells Laura that she “was ready to go as far as it would take, including IVF and egg donation” to become pregnant. “Alina was about to disappear,” Laura surmised, “and join the sect of mothers, those creatures with no life of their own who, zombie-like with huge bags under their eyes, lugged prams around the streets of the city.” At the story’s periphery is Laura’s alienated relationship with her mother, not exactly contentious but ungratifying – and there is Marlene, Alina’s dedicated young nanny who is incapable of having children.
Almost all of this is revealed in the brief opening chapters. Then, Alina gives birth – but the health of the child, Inés, is precarious (“the mutation of a gene on chromosome 17”). In addition, Laura starts to intervene in, and attempts to mitigate, the turmoil between Doris and Nicolas. I continued reading, but with some misgivings. It seemed that I was being set up for an op-ed, disguised as prose fiction, about injustices inflicted by the patriarchy and the unappreciated burdens placed on child-bearing women. These oppressive factors, of course, are quite real. But Still Life is no surreptitious editorial. In fact, Nettel plays a sly but artful trick on the reader that results in a nuanced situation, even as she remains dedicated to envisioning the plight of women. When Laura takes Nicolas to the park, we hear about the murder of three women – “’The guy who killed them said that they were whores who deserved it and that if he was set free, he’d do it again.’”
Nettel emerges as a master of not telling too much while guiding us toward a complex vision of the familiar. Here we have Laura, resolutely childless, taking us not only into the perilous circumstances of Inés and her parents, but also the distressful mother-son situation next door. But why? Why does Laura want to tell this story? This is where Nettel withholds “insight” and simply lets us witness things while deftly managing the novel’s tension. We pay close attention with Laura as our inclination to care for Nettel’s characters nudges us away from an exclusive polemical attitude toward a capability to embrace complexity and contradiction. Along the way, we watch Alina deal with a series of various medical practitioners – none of which agrees with the diagnoses of any of the others.
I almost forgot to mention the pigeons. Early on, Laura discovers a pigeon’s nest and chicks on her apartment’s balcony. And then, the cuckoo: “The thing I found most disconcerting was realizing how the female cuckoos felt the biological urge to reproduce and at the same time, an equally powerful need to get out of the labour of raising their young.” Did a cuckoo lay an egg in the nest so the maternal pigeon would care for it?
[Published by Bloomsbury on August 8, 2023, 207 pages, $26.99 hardcover. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize]
Of related interest On The Seawall – “The Other Side of the Dock,” a story by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Click here.
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The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said that “an ‘age’ does not pre-exist the statements which express it, nor the visibilities which fill it.” When a novelist takes this operatively, the shapes and sounds of fiction are up for grabs. But there’s a conundrum: the novelist wants to implement their own optional standards, but the polemics of liberation and social justice pre-exist the work. So, how does the novelist address the malignities of the age (already spelled out, acknowledged and repeated) while shaping something not yet articulated?
It intrigues me that the editors at Two Lines Press, to whom we owe a debt for publishing Megan Ewing’s translation of Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory, believe we will be drawn to the book for its depiction of “the profound impact of the sugar industry on the world” and for how Elmiger “obsessively connects a violent global industry to our unsettled present.” Such back cover copy points back to the pre-existing notions of anti-colonialism in our “age,” perhaps best studied via the many nonfiction texts on the history of sugar, capitalism and slavery. Elmiger certainly wields the chronicle of the punishing development of sucrose in the New World. But this is a novel obsessed not with sugar but with abjection, uncertainty, creative groping, provisionality, desire and pleasure.
The narrator is a researcher who envisions the location of her speaking as a mélange of images and memories with “no fixed order … objects seem to enter into new relationships, new constellation with each other.” She continues, “When I leaf through my notebooks and photocopies, the illustrations, diagrams, and photographs, when I open the files created over the course of the past months, I see no path – no images or illuminations overlapping each other at the edges, pointing to each other – but instead a place, a point from which I started four or five years ago. Since then, everything I’ve touched, everything I’ve seen that seemed connected with the first location, I’ve carried it back and set it down in that encompassing space.” The document we’re reading is a journal. The narrator recalls her travels in the Americas, comments on the life of lottery winner Werner Bruni, and touches on a range of figures including Max Frisch, Heinrich von Kleist, Ellen West, Karl Marx, and others.
Throughout, the emphasis is on the desires of these people – as if craving itself is the propulsive force through which significant acts occur. The hankering for sweetness may be an iconic urge here, but it is recurrent, not dominant, even if “sugar production connects unknowns across time and space”: “After having filed my notes and photocopies in the ‘sugar’ folder for a long time, thinking that I could follow the events, the persons and their desires, their lapses, without bringing myself into play – in this room I understand that this has always been a misunderstanding.” But she is constantly bringing herself into play.
There is her itinerant relationship with a man called “C” — could he be the one asking questions in the several sections of interrogation? In one dialogue, C asks, “But is the claim that you are simply incapable of doing what is commonly understood as ‘storytelling’ false?” She answers, “No, that is correct.” He: “What’s stopping you?” She replies, “Well, it’s just that every possible thing happens while I’m sitting at my desk … But it is quite impossible for me to bring these things into the text in their simultaneity.” And so this notebook pivots between the current moment of speaking and the historical scenes she sketches. One of them involves Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) who in 1827 abducted a 15-year old heiress named Ellen Turner; he married her in Scotland before Ellen’s father could intervene. Greed and exploitation corrupt the culture.
In passing, there is the story of Flora Tristan (1803-1844) who travels to Peru to claim her inheritance. But it is Tristan’s love life that the narrator wants to comment on, since Tristan “no longer expected to be understood by a man who was not capable of that great devotion commonly perceived as madness because it is entirely without self-interest.” Tristan is “so gluttonous and gourmet at the same time” – does the narrator sense this in herself? And if so, does she see herself as part of the global urge to burn itself up through its desires? Her research uncovers the link between production and oppression; her notebook, however, comprises “dark whirlpools, in which everything, including everything peripheral, swirls with deafening noise forever around an unstable center. And more is always being pulled in.” This includes everything that comprises her person. The sugar factory is perhaps her own turbulent mind.
At the outset, the narrator briefly considers the last writings of the German poet and writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974). In Places, Kaschnitz described her stay at a sanitarium on Lake Constance. The narrator, too, spent some time at such a place. She quotes a few lines; Kaschnitz meets Nijinsky, Kaschnitz dances with other convalescents. There’s not much to this, just modest pleasures. But it was enough to remind me of a short poem by Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller. And the poem reminds me of this narrative:
BY WRITING
By writing I wanted
To save my soul.
I tried to make poems
It did not work.
I tried to tell stories
It did not work.
You cannot write
To save your soul.
Given up, it drifts and does the singing.
[Published by Two Lines Press on May 9, 2023, 259 pages, $15.95 paperback]