Natural Histories Hardcover - 2014

Excerpt

I’ve been a biology professor at the Universidad de Valle de México for over ten years. I specialize in insects. Some people in my field of research have pointed out to me that when I’m in the laboratory or lecture hall I almost always keep to the corners of the room. It’s like when I’m walking along a street; I feel safer if I’m near a wall. Though I can’t explain exactly why, I’ve begun to think it’s a habit born of the depths of my nature. My fascination for insects emerged at a young age, when I was about eleven and passing from childhood into adolescence. My parents had recently split up, and as neither one of them was psychologically sound enough to be responsible for the mistake they had engendered together, they decided to send me to live with my mom’s older sister, my aunt Claudine, who had managed to build a functional family with two disciplined, tidy, and studious sons. I knew their house well. It was part of a middle-class housing complex with American dreams, as my dad would say. Very different from the place where I’d been born and had spent eleven long years. My house and my aunt’s were opposite in every way. . . . 

Media reviews

"The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions."—Xavier Houssain, Le Monde

"Guadalupe Nettel is one of the most interesting voices of the new Mexican fiction."—J.A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia

"Seasoned readers will delight in this literary voice, new to the landscape of Latin American literature, a voice sophisticated as it is original."—Arcadia

"Guadalupe Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings of odd behavior and painstakingly examines the intimacies of her soul."—Magazine Littéraire

"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 Vásquez

"The career of this young storyteller is worth keeping an eye on. A master of style, with a marvelous poetic naturalism, her ideas and manners distinguish her from what we are accustomed to in Mexican literature."—Joaquin Marco, El Cultural