Guadalupe Nettel on Capturing the (Vaguely) Surreal Side of Contemporary Life

Guadalupe Nettel and I first met in Berkeley at the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, where she appeared on a panel I moderated honoring the centennial of the birth of Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer who is considered the father of magical realism. He had a transformative influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who compared him to Sophocles, and ushered in the Latin American boom. Nettel described reading Rulfo’s classic novel Pedro Paramo in high school—an assigned book which seemed more appealing once it was banned, and richer in influence upon rereading multiple times.

“Landscape becomes a character in Rulfo’s work,” said Nettel. “Rulfo gives voice to the rural people, those who have had no voice.” Nettel brought with her to the BABF copies of the first issue of Revista de la Universidad de México, the publication she edits, which honored Juan Rulfo. The magazine featured authors from different generations, Latin Americans, and almost every continent–Juan Villoro, Chiara Valerio, Annie Ernaux, Álvaro Enrigue, Cristina Rivera Garza, Martín Caparrós, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Antonio Ortuño, and Claudia Piñeiro.

Juan Rulfo is still one of her favorite writers, she told me this month. “Not just Mexican, but from all over the world. Among the things I admire most about his writing is his ability to truly put himself in his characters’ shoes. I love his use of the first-person narrative, where the author’s voice and judgment are absent, and where we hear the inhabitants of remote villages, disturbed children, even ghosts speak. I also like the universe that borders on the fantastic and the extremely realistic that permeates all his stories. His veiled yet piercing critique of the social injustices that have always characterized my country.”

Our email conversation crossed many time zones (she was in Europe, I’m in Sonoma County, California). “Right now, I’m in Paris,” she explained. “I’m spending a year here thanks to the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination’s artist-in-residence program. In May I’ll go to New York to participate in the PEN World Voices Festival, and in June I’ll go to the Hay Festival and other British cities to present The Accidentals.” Then back home to Mexico City, where she is based. “I like to travel. Getting to know other cities and the readers I have there fills me with joy. Many trips have inspired my stories. But I must say that to write I need some stability. At least a week in the same place, preferably a month, sleeping in the same bed and writing at the same table. Writing trips, the ones where I go just for that, away from family responsibilities and all obligations, are the best way I’ve found to focus.”

Jane Ciabattari: How did your new collection begin? Why did you decide to call it The Accidentals?

For some people, it can be so disconcerting to feel like they’ve already missed the boat that was going to take them to fulfillment that they begin to fake their life.

Guadalupe Nettel: I decided on the title once I finished writing the story about albatrosses who get lost and can never return home. It wasn’t the first in the collection, but I saw the common thread there. I was deeply moved by discovering what happens to these birds, so attached to their routines and life stages like happens to a vast majority of human beings. I told myself there are many people like them these days. Many of us have lost our bearings or the points of reference we once had, such as the idea of technological and scientific progress, getting married or achieving greater purchasing power and social success—which was what guided many people around the world, but that’s becoming less and less the case.

The climate emergency and its dramatic manifestations, the experience of COVID and lockdown, have left us completely disoriented. We don’t know where to go. At least that’s how I feel. The metaphor of the lost albatrosses could be applied to each of the characters in this book. I like the word “accidental” because it also refers to what bursts into the course of life and also to music, to notes that suddenly change pitch, like a flat or a sharp.

JC: Which story came first? How did you decide the order?

GN: The oldest story in this book is “Life Elsewhere.” I wrote it when I began to sense that my youth was coming to an end, and I feared one day I’d find myself like the narrator who sees the opportunities to be who I wanted to be slipping away. I was living in Barcelona at the time, and the apartment in Gràcia was inspired by one I would have liked to rent but another couple took it. It’s very curious how each writer chooses the order in their collection of stories. It’s a strong temptation to put those we consider the most powerful and most accomplished at the beginning, but that puts those that come later at a disadvantage.

The first thing I did was discard those I didn’t like as much and leave only the stories that truly convinced me. It was important to me that each story be in places where it could shine. I decided to start with one that I like, and that several reader friends I trust like a lot, but that I don’t consider the best of the collection. I chose it because of its length—not too long, not too short, because it has a female narrator, which already says a lot about the book—and because it addresses problematic family dynamics, another constant in the book.

I put the shortest story second to announce that there would also be male narrators and because it connects well with the previous story. Many albums I love have the best song in third place, so I decided to put the story I like the most and hold most dear there, and then another one that I also consider one of the strongest. I think the book truly takes off from that story.

JC: The title story is a love story of sorts, covering decades. The narrator meets Camilo when they are both five; his family, exiles from Uruguay, arrive in Mexico and move into an apartment directly below her family. She and Camilo become playmates. When she is eleven, she bids farewell to Camilo, assuming they will never see each other again. Her father takes a research position in New Orleans, where she sees her first albatross. She and her father share a fascination with the bird, and even visit Patagonia, where she explores a colony of black-browed albatrosses, filled with adolescents who have returned to their place of origin after four or five years flying across the ocean.

They discover a “nest with an abandoned egg,” and learn an albatross only abandons its home “in order to save its life.” She thinks of her neighbors, forced to leave home, and of the albatrosses that end up in highly unusual places, called “vagrant albatrosses” or “accidentals.” She and Camilo reconnect not long after her father’s death. What research was involved in weaving together this story of exile and albatrosses, exile and love?

GN: I grew up, like the narrator, in a neighborhood full of South American exiles, victims of the military dictatorships that prevailed in several countries on the continent in the 1970s. They were mainly Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan children, and then, at the age of ten, I moved with my mother. Since then, I’ve been aware of what it means to change countries, to adapt to another culture, to be a foreigner. When you spend your childhood in another country, you put down roots there too and never quite feel fully at home anywhere. It’s a bit like having divorced parents and living alternately with both. It turns you into a bit of an “accidental.” I wanted to pay homage to that neighborhood, to those people, to the children I grew up with, and I wanted to talk about the longing to return home, to one’s origin, to one’s rank, in the case of birds, to feel like we belong again in our flock.

JC: The role of fantasy in human life is at the center of your story “Life Elsewhere,” which opens when the narrator, an actor searching for roles, and his wife are apartment hunting in Barcelona. They move into his wife’s choice, “a bright space with a covered sun terrace,” with squat architecture. He continues to yearn after the other, more stylish (and less sunny) first-floor apartment, in an older building—an apartment with a Modernist main door, columns and arches lending it “an air of distinction.” That division in taste morphs into an alternate life, in which he reconnects with Xavi Mestre, an acting school classmate who has become famous. You build this shift into a new reality, as if his dreams are being enacted before us. What is the secret to this transformation?

GN: This story deals with the feeling, very common during the so-called midlife crisis, in which we suddenly look at our lives and wonder, “How did I end up here when I was meant to be there?” For some people, it can be so disconcerting to feel like they’ve already missed the boat that was going to take them to fulfillment that they begin to fake their life. The narrator of this story sees a man who has fulfilled all the dreams he harbored for himself and begins to crave his life so much that he gravitates toward those around him like a moth around a flame, trying to blend in, to the point where he forgets to live his own life. When I wrote this story, I felt it was bordering on the fantastic, but the more bitter people I meet, the more I realize the story is quite realistic.

All these stories are inspired by everyday life and many contemporary emotions. I feel they’re slightly dystopian, but not too much.

JC: “Torpor” is set “fifteen years since the world changed completely and we passed into ‘locked-down mode,’ this intramural life we’ve been leading ever since the virus appeared.” The narrator teaches literature at a university via distance learning. She and her husband and two children sleep longer and longer each night, masked, in increasingly unbearable heat. The state has control of the press, so the idea of climate change is viewed as an “urban legend.” She fantasizes about escape, returning to a forest where she once saw a family of foxes. This yearning is so contemporary. How did this story evolve?

GN: I think the closer we see the climate emergency approaching, the more we yearn to live in nature. This story is inspired by the lockdown we experienced during COVID-19, but not only that. Surveillance is something we all suffer from daily, as is the lack of trust in what our governments and the media tell us. We long for the freedom of animals in nature, we long for connection with forests and rivers and with other species that live in freedom. All these stories are inspired by everyday life and many contemporary emotions. I feel they’re slightly dystopian, but not too much. They occupy a borderline between the fantastic and the real, something I call liminal fantasy, and it’s the literary genre I feel most comfortable with.

JC: You have won multiple international awards–Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero (Spain), the Premio Herralde (Spain) and Anna Seghers Prize (Germany) and also been shortlisted for the International Booker, the Neustadt Prize and The Guardian first book award. How have these awards influenced your life and work?

GN: The recognition I’ve received throughout my career has been a great incentive to keep working, and I’m very grateful for it. Remembering those moments helps me persevere when I feel low on self-confidence.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

GN: I’m working on a new novel that sometimes captivates me and sometimes seems shapeless, so it’s hard to know when I’ll finish it.

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