The Accidentals E-Book

Guadalupe Nettel

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 176

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical, The Accidentals is the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.

Leseprobe

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‘Guadalupe Nettel yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in life’s most intimate and familiar aspects. The Accidentals never loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty.’

— Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

‘I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer.’

— Daisy Johnson, author of The Hotel 

‘The Accidentals is a striking and compelling collection that searches for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each narrative veers seamlessly from the mundane to the existential; the writing is deft and unsettling prose imbues the work with a profound resonance. I loved these stories, mad and controlled, and brilliant.’

— Elaine Feeney, author of All the Good Things You Deserve 

‘Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature.... I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature.’ 

— Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

‘I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science.’ 

— Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast

‘Nettel is free. She has succeeded in creating an audacious narrative style all her own, a singular and fearless way of being in the world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature.’ 

— Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac’s Problem

4‘The stories in The Accidentals move through a landscape that is both foreign and familiar, mysterious and menacing, dreamy and distraught, and I had the palpable sense that anything might happen next. It is the kind of book you read in a single afternoon, gladly relinquishing the cares of day-to-day life to sink into its otherworldly submersions.’

— Jessie Ren Marshall, author of Women! In! Peril! 

Praise for Still Born

‘In Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood, which this novel explores and deepens.’ 

— Annie Ernaux, author of The Years

‘Deeply intelligent, Still Born is a propulsive novel with a depth of feeling so woven into the language that it never feels worn or applied. The denatured quality of the tone means the ideas of the book – the suspicion of the body as having incompatible desires from the mind; the impulses versus the aversions to child-having; the complexities of the mother-child dynamic – all just absolutely sing. I loved it.’

— Susannah Dickey, author of Common Decency

‘This highly original novel, in an excellent translation by Rosalind Harvey, pursues a range of ideas connected to children, who should have them and who should take care of them.… There’s a dark undertow to Still Born that reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s novels.’

— Miranda France, TLS

5‘Still Born is an astonishingly elegant, intelligent, affecting novel, which has stayed in my mind from the moment I began it to long after I finished. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had encountered a work of art about ambivalence in mothering, which encompassed a true, authentic range of emotions and curiosities – vanity, aggression, jealousy and selfishness – with sanguine acceptance, as well as the beautiful and difficult project of giving and sustaining love which marks all our lives, mothers or otherwise.’ 

— Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

‘Still Born is a startling novel about whatever it is that drives adults to take care of children, and all the many things that make that care painful and sometimes impossible. There is a quiet force to the poised and deliberate writing. The novel is a deep exploration of affection and vulnerability.’

— Caleb Klaces, author of Fatherhood

‘Still Born is a rare thing: an unsentimental analysis of the ambivalences and moral complexity of motherhood. It is a book which demands to be discussed, at length, with friends, and I longed to do so.’ 

— Jessie Greengrass, author of The High House

‘I read Still Born in less than a day. It is perfect: deeply feminist, wise, funny and alive. Nettel is generous to each of her characters, and in prose that is crisp and light. I love this book.’

— Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things

‘Rosalind Harvey skilfully translates the original Spanish into precise and plain, but deeply moving, prose. Without resorting to sentimentality, the novel charts its characters’ halting efforts to understand and comfort one another. It is a piercing reflection on the ways acts of care bind people together.’

— Economist6

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THE ACCIDENTALS

GUADALUPE NETTEL

Translated by ROSALIND HARVEY

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHIMPRINTINGTHE FELLOWSHIP OF ORPHANSPLAYING WITH FIRETHE PINK DOORA FOREST UNDER THE EARTHLIFE ELSEWHERETHE ACCIDENTALSTHE TORPORABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT10

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For Mir, Lorenzo and Mateo12

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‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’

— Anaïs Nin14

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IMPRINTING

Before he died, my uncle was in hospital for three weeks. I found out due to a coincidence, or what the surrealists used to call ‘objective chance’, to describe those fortuitous events that seem dictated by our destiny. Around this time, my best friend Verónica’s mother was suffering from very late-stage cancer and was a patient in the intensive care unit at the same clinic. One morning, Verónica had asked me to go with her to visit her mother, and I couldn’t say no. We left the university, which was in the same neighbourhood, and, instead of going to our Latin etymology class, we got on the bus. As I wandered through the corridors waiting for Verónica to attend to her mother, I amused myself by reading the names of patients on the doors. Seeing my uncle’s was enough to understand he was a relative, but it took me some time to figure out who he was. After several seconds of confusion – a feeling comparable to when we discover in a cemetery a tombstone with our surname on it, with no idea to whom it belongs – I realized that the sick man was Frank, my mother’s older brother. I was aware of his existence, but I didn’t know him. He was the exiled relative of my family, as it were, a man nobody mentioned out loud, let alone in front of my mum. Despite being filled with curiosity at that moment, I didn’t dare stick my head into the room lest he recognize me. An absurd fear, really, since as far as I knew we’d never met.

I stayed there for a good while, not knowing what to do, concentrating on my heartbeat, which only grew faster and faster, until the door opened and two women dressed in white emerged from the room. One of them was holding a breakfast tray with dirty plates on it.16

‘That man eats more than a St. Bernard. Who would have thought it in his state?’

It amused me to find out that the nurses joked about their patients, as did the possibility that my uncle was an imaginary invalid like Molière’s, whom we were reading in my drama class.

On the bus on the way back to the university, I told Verónica about my discovery. I also told her everything I knew about Frank. A good student from primary school up until the final year of exams, he had obtained an impeccable reputation at school, as well as the admiration of all his teachers. He was always able to count on my grandmother’s collusion for this – as I once heard my mother say – because she would provide excuses for his absences from class, as well as his antics at home. After completing one year of an engineering degree, he quit to devote himself to photography, and then later on to wandering the globe. My relatives spoke too about his vices and addictions, but I never heard anyone specify exactly what sort these were. He was never present for the big events in my family, my brother’s graduation or my fifteenth birthday, occasions where gaggles of relatives would sprout as if by spontaneous generation and to whom I had to introduce myself several times over. All of my uncles would be there, apart from Frank. On occasion I would hear old friends of my parents ask after him with morbid curiosity, as you might ask after someone when you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there will be some sort of hilarious new titbit. It was impossible, at least for me, not to notice how uncomfortable my mother was when answering questions about her brother’s whereabouts. I know he’s in Asia, she would say, or, He’s still with his girlfriend, the sculptor. The things I knew about him I had heard in passing, as in those instances, 17but at the time, Frank’s life didn’t interest me a great deal.

The following day I asked Verónica if she would let me accompany her to the hospital. This time we missed a linguistics and phonology class, the most boring of all. We got to the hospital at around midday. Once my friend had gone into her mother’s room, I waited a few minutes and then, after making sure there were no nurses in Frank’s room, I knocked at the door and went in. It was the first time I stood before his bed, a place I would return to many times. My uncle was a robust-looking man with a shock of grey hair who did not, in effect, have the appearance of a sick man. What he did have was a combination of features very like my own. His expression, unlike the other patients, such as Verónica’s mother, was lucid, and he was conscious of everything happening around him. His left arm was connected via a catheter to a drip containing all sorts of medicines, but aside from this, and from a slight paralysis down the left-hand side of his face, he seemed ready to leap out of bed.

‘We don’t know each other,’ I said. ‘I’m Antonia, your niece.’

For a second or two I felt as if, rather than being a pleasant surprise, my presence had frightened him. It was a fleeting sensation, the brief flash caused by intuition, but as unmistakable to me as the shock I had felt the previous day when standing outside his door. Before replying, a seductive smile crossed his face, the same one he would offer me every time I went to visit him.

I’ve always thought it strange the familiarity we establish with someone unknown as soon as we find out they are related to us. I’m sure this has nothing to do with an immediate affinity, but rather with something artificial, such as culture, a conventional allegiance to the clan or, 18as some say, a surname. This, however, was not what took place between my uncle and me that morning. I don’t know if it was because of the irreverent reputation he enjoyed among my relatives, or the disobedience implied by having anything to do with him; the fact is, I felt an admiration similar to that evoked by characters from legend.

He asked me how I had found him and requested that I didn’t tell anyone. There was no way he wanted to get back in touch with my family. To reassure him, I explained that it had been by accident. I told him about Verónica and her mother, and assured him that he could count on my silence.

For the first few days, I found the smell of the hospital and of my uncle unbearable. And so instead of sitting in the visitors’ chair next to his bed, I positioned myself on a concrete ledge by the window, which let in a pleasant breeze. I was there for over an hour, replying to the questions he asked me about university, my literary tastes, my political opinions. It was the first time someone in my family was taking seriously the fact that I was studying literature, without thinking that my choice was down to a lack of talent for anything else or that it was a degree aimed at women who hoped to devote their entire lives to marriage. It also surprised me how much he had read. There wasn’t a single one of the writers I mentioned that morning of whom he hadn’t read at least one book. Then Verónica gave a knock and, from the doorway, signalled for me to come out.

I didn’t kiss him goodbye. I held out my hand without looking at him with a shyness he seemed to find amusing, then walked to the door.

‘Come back soon,’ he said.

On the bus, my friend grilled me.

‘He’s still so handsome,’ she remarked eagerly. ‘He must 19have been quite a looker as a young man. Be careful though– there must be a reason your family’s not keen on him.’

It was a Thursday. We were in the middle of the rainy season and I arrived home dripping wet. My mother and my brothers would be out until late, so the kitchen and all the bedrooms were dark. I put down my books and, without wasting any time, went straight to the study to look for the box where my mother kept all her childhood photographs: two carefully assembled albums that recorded her first few years of life. There she was with my uncle Amadeo and an older boy with enormous dark brown eyes, who could be none other than Frank. In several of these pictures they were smiling and playing in a swimming pool, a park, or in my grandparents’ back yard. After the first few pages, the older boy mysteriously disappeared. Outside these photo albums, there were other loose photos in the bottom of the box. In these, my mum must have been in her early thirties. Her clothes were unusually bohemian: huipiles and skirts with indigenous embroidery, bell-bottoms, copious bangles. My brother and I would appear from time to time in our parents’ arms, wearing pyjamas or underwear. In the most recent ones, I must have been five or six years old. Many of these photos had been systematically cropped. I suspected, and I don’t think I was wrong, that the part that had been censored was actually Frank’s head or entire torso. Probably, in some remote period, he had lived with us, something my mother had never mentioned. The way the paper had been cut made it easy to imagine the furious action of the scissors. What could he have done to deserve such a vicious attack? And in any case, why had the childhood photos, where they all seemed so close, not been removed as well? I thought about Juan, my own brother, three years older than me. Ever since he’d become a teenager, we inhabited 20the same house with no camaraderie whatsoever. The closeness we had forged during childhood had been forgotten some while ago. Nevertheless, it would never have occurred to me to remove his silhouette from family photos. I heard a key turn in the door. My brother was back from university with a couple of friends and they went to sit in the dining room. I put the box back on the shelf in the study and returned to my room without a sound.

The next morning, I went back to the hospital. No sooner had I entered than I noticed a satisfied expression on my uncle’s face. This time I was the one who asked the questions. I asked him to tell me his story from when he lived in my grandparents’ house, what his childhood had been like, and his experience at university. His account did not contradict the one I had heard from my family, but he added a dose of scorn and humour that made it far more enjoyable. In his version, the family dramas became comedies, and the reactions of each member of the family a faithful caricature. In almost twenty years he hadn’t forgotten any of their personalities and imitated them to a tee, making me burst out laughing several times. The only one who escaped his barbs was my mother. That week I found out about a number of family secrets: my aunt Laura’s first experiences of love, which led her to have an abortion; my father’s compulsive jealousy; the mysterious death of a neighbour, which some attributed to my grandfather... If they all had some dark episode in their past, why had he been the only one to be cast out?

I asked him as delicately as I could, and he replied that he had been the one to cut off all contact so as not to feel judged on his acts and his choices.

‘But don’t you miss having the support of a family?’

‘If I liked families, don’t you think I would have formed my own?’21

I must have opened my eyes wider than was expected because my uncle burst out laughing.

‘Don’t make that face! In time you’ll see I’m right. You’re not like the others. I could see that even when you were little.’

His comment made me shiver. I was flattered that Frank considered me cleverer than the rest of our relatives, in whom I too saw countless defects, but at the same time, it frightened me to be different. Even though I liked literature, even though I was drawn to transgressive, eccentric people like him, I did want to get married and have children. The thought of not achieving this worried me immensely, especially the idea that I might one day find myself in hospital without anyone’s support.

‘So you’d already met me?’

In response, Frank took my hand. It was the first time he had touched me – at least that I remember – but in his warm, protective palm I felt, despite the circumstances, an indisputable intimacy. Somewhere, probably in one of those educational magazines that were always lying around at my grandparents’ house, I had read something about the traces left in our memory by the touch and scent of those we come into contact with in the first few years of our lives. Imprinting, I think it’s called. According to the article, this bodily mark is where family ties are cemented. We remained like that for a few more minutes, his larger hand covering mine. Not even the presence of the nurses made us let go of each other. For me it was a silent pact, the tacit promise that I wasn’t going to leave him there to his fate.

It was the start of the weekend. Even with the pretext of accompanying Verónica, it would be difficult for me to be out of the house without drawing attention to myself. What’s more, on the Saturday we had a wedding 22to go to, and then a lunch on the Sunday.

When I explained this to Frank, he asked that I at least try to call him on the phone.

‘I was quite peaceful here before you showed up. Now that I’ve found you, I suspect I’m going to miss you.’ I assured him that I felt the same.

Before going back to university, I asked to speak with his doctor. The specialist wasn’t around at that point, but the person on call was able to give me a few explanations: Frank had a tumour in his brain that had been there for several years and it was no longer possible to give him any treatment, aside from palliative care.

I had to go and hide in the toilet so Verónica wouldn’t see me cry. She who tried with all her might to keep herself afloat while her mother lay dying – what would she have thought if she’d found me in floods of tears for someone I barely knew?

The time I spent in the company of my family but away from him seemed interminable. At the wedding, I made a great effort not to laugh, remembering his imitations of all of them. I would have preferred a thousand times over to be in his hospital room with its smell of disinfectant rather than to listen to their repetitive conversations. I thought about how different all our family get-togethers would have been if he had been present. The reasons you can fall into disgrace with your own relatives are strange, so very strange. Over the years I have observed all kinds of cases, and I’ve come to believe that they are hardly ever down to questions of morality or principles, but rather to internal betrayals, perhaps invisible to outsiders’ eyes, but unforgivable to the clan to whom they belong, or at least, to certain members. On Sunday morning, as I helped my mother make lunch, I tried to broach the subject.

‘What did Uncle Frank do for you to stop talking to 23him?’ I asked, trying to play down the issue. Her answer was short but unequivocal.

‘He behaved like an idiot.’

She was in a good mood that day, and the levity with which she received my question reassured me. She promptly left the kitchen to go and see to her guests.

On Monday morning, when I returned to the hospital, I found Frank with a respirator over his mouth. I tried to hide how upset I was. I made some joke about the apparatus and he smiled beneath the mask.