GUADALUPE NETTEL (Mexico City, 1973) won the Radio France Internationale Prix de la Meilleure nouvelle en Langue Fran aise prize for non-French-speaking countries. For several years she has collaborated with a number of French- and Spanish-language magazines and literary supplements such as Lateral, Letras Libres, Parentesis, La Jornada Semanal, L'atelier du roman, and L'inconvenient. Recently she earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris. Her novel The Guest was published simultaneously in Spanish (Anagrama) and French (Actes Sud). Her collection of short stories Petalos (Petals) has been awarded the Gilberto Owen National Book Award and the Antonin Artaud Award for best novel. Her award-winning work has been translated into French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Swedish. She lives in Mexico City.
"With straightforward, honest prose, Nettel paints a vivid portrait
of a girl always just on the edge of community and illustrates the
beauty and strength of a mind shaped by hardship. She perfectly
captures the awkwardness and insecurities of growing up and the
small, strange moments that change us forever." —Publishers
Weekly
"One of the fascinating qualities of this book is the unsparing
testimony, somewhere between religious confession and secular
disclosure, that gives a sharp sense of a woman’s harrowing
girlhood. Nettel’s candid, unaffected prose hews closely to the
strictures of the therapy session. In this, she runs the risk
of turning her story into a “case.” ... Still, Nettel’s
strategy yields rich rewards. Concealing the adult narrator
disturbs the distance between reader and author; the intimacy
forces the reader into the girl’s vulnerable body. This vivid
image of the ardent girl as revealed by a faceless woman hints at
the tangled snare of the past. An effort to shed an old self may
simply make a person disappear. —The New York Times Book
Review
"Nettel's eye lightly deforms things and gives rise to a tension,
subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an uncomfortable
reality, disquieting, even disturbing—a gaze that illuminates her
prose like an alien sun shining down on our world." —Valeria
Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the
Crowd
"The Body Where I Was Born infuses the reader with an intimate
portrait of the astute and wondrous depth that children use to
observe and makes sense of humanity. The language in the book is
poetic yet accessible, and at certain points Nettel hits you with a
sentence so brilliant and poignant that you have to read it another
time in order to fully indulge the narrator’s oral recollection of
who she was. This book is fierce and from the gut. It is a
testimony of a woman finding agency in her body because it is
physical evidence that connects her to the planet and the rest of
humanity." —World Literature Today
"Here is an utterly compelling memoir about a specific body, which
simultaneous conjures the fragility of that body, as well as the
ever-shifting body of memory itself. Nettel has brilliantly found a
form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold." —Nick
Flynn
"It has been a long time since I've found in the literature of my
generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of
Guadalupe Nettel." —Juan Gabriel Vásquez
"The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and
destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us
seeing straight into our own obsessions." —Xavier Houssain, Le
Monde
"Guadalupe Nettel is one of the most interesting voices of the new
Mexican fiction." —J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia
"Guadalupe Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings of
odd behavior and painstakingly examines the intimacies of her
soul." —Magazine Littéraire
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