Literature without borders

Guadalupe Nettel, a thousand and one ways to become a mother (or not)

Audio 29:00

Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel in the studio at RFI (February 2022).

© Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint/RFI

By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

2 mins

Born in Mexico in 1973, Guadalupe Nettel has shared her life between Mexico City, Barcelona and Paris.

She is the author of several storybooks, collections of short stories and four novels.

Winner of numerous literary prizes in France, Spain and Mexico, her work has been translated into a dozen countries, and she is now considered one of the most luminous novelists in Latin American literature.

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The rare bird © Dalva

"The two friends had made an oath to each other: they would never allow themselves to be mothers. Impossible to imagine giving up their freedom for a child. And yet, one day, Alina decides to get pregnant. Laura wavers, overwhelmed at the idea of ​​seeing her friend renounce their ideals. Reality, she, will take care of sweeping them away completely; the arrival of Alina's child, little Inès, is accompanied by terrible surprises. While the young woman discovers a motherhood for which she was not prepared, it is with one of her young neighbors that Laura weaves bonds as astonishing as they are deep.And while the lives of these two friends find themselves turned upside down forever , strange birds take up residence on Laura's balcony.

At the heart of

L'Oiseau rare

, there is the striking power of children: those we choose to have or those who arrive in our lives, those we watch grow up, those we love and those which we give up.

With the singularity that we know her, Guadalupe Nettel thus speaks to us of the thousand ways of being a mother, of fights, of dramas and of the way in which we learn to love."

(Presentation of the novel translated from Spanish by Joséphine de Wispelaere published

by Dalva

).

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