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The Body Where I Was Born
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
7 posts | 6 read | 10 to read
The first novel to appear in English by one of the most talked-about and critically acclaimed writers of new Mexican fiction. From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood--in which she was born with an abnormality in her eye into a family intent on fixing it. In a world without the time and space for innocence, the narrator intimately recalls her younger self--a fierce and discerning girl open to life's pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy. With raw language and a brilliant sense of humor, both delicate and unafraid, Nettel strings together hard-won, unwieldy memories--taking us from Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence, France, then back home again--to create a portrait of the artist as a young girl. In these pages, Nettel's art of storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality. "Nettel's eye...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" "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 VAsquez, author of "The Sound of Things Falling" "Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings...and painstakingly examines the intimacies of her soul." --"Magazine LittEraire" "Guadalupe Nettel's storytelling power is majestic."--"Typographical Era" In Praise of "Natural Histories" "Five flawless stories..." --"The New York Times" "Nettel's stories are as atmospheric and emotionally battering as Checkhov's."--"Asymptote"
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decembersveryown
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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“Many people during their childhoods suffer corrective treatment in response to nothing more than their parents‘ more or less arbitrary obsessions...Perhaps therein lies the true rule of the conservation of our species. We perpetuate unto the newest generation the neuroses of our forebearers, wounds we keep inflicting on ourselves like a second layer of genetic inscription.”

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tricours
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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Pickpick

I‘ve spent a horribly long time reading this book, but I really liked it. It‘s slow going but never boring, and well written and constructed.

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parasolofdoom
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
Pickpick

This short bildungsroman HAS to be an autobiographical novel -- it's basically a monologue and reads very much like a memoir. Totally sucked in at the beginning but grew a touch restless in the last quarter. Still definitely a great book.

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parasolofdoom
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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sofiaga
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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Book booty from my trip to Mexico. I also got a really cool Katrina dressed as Frida to put on my bookshelf.

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prowlix
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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More catching up! One of my goals this year was to read more #translatedbooks so here are the books I recommend from my recent reads! #SeptPhotoChallenge

RealLifeReading I loved the Showa series! And Beauty Is A Wound was so weird and dark and funny 8y
37 likes1 comment
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prowlix
The Body Where I Was Born | Guadalupe Nettel
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"The bodies where we are born are not the same bodies that we leave the world in."

I finished this book while on vacation while I was distracted. I loved it but I almost feel like it needs a closer read than I was able to do! I may need to reread once I'm settled back at home ?

#MexicanReads #Translation #WNDB

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