The Body Where I Was Born [Paperback]

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. Born with an abnormality in her eye and a family intent on fixing it, she occupies 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, Guadalupe 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 The Body Where I Was Born, Nettel’s artful storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality. 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 t