This novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, is centered around a baby that surprises everyone, including the reader. Spoilers.
Originally published in The Book Cafe on Medium on May 10, 2024
I read Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born recently and it made a strong impression on me. Part of it had to do with the very tautly structured plot and writing, which managed to draw home the story even more powerfully, and then the plot is distinctive, even in today’s ginormous publishing space, and poses difficult questions.
I don’t know how to write about this book without revealing many spoilers, including its major twist, as the whole book comes together not only around questions of whether to have children or not, but also around the issue of a fetus with microlissencephaly that’s supposed to die soon after birth. The fact that the baby is born and doesn’t die, but even thrives to some extent, is the whole crux of the novel.
Microlissencephaly, as the word denotes, means a small cerebrum with a smooth surface. It’s a rare congenital disorder that affects 1 in 100,000 newborns. These days doctors give these babies a life expectancy of 10 years, but in the novel the mother of the baby, Alina, is told in no uncertain terms that her baby will live only a few short hours, for her brain can’t sustain life in any significant way. The baby won’t be able to process sensory input and will live a very short life as a “vegetable.” Alina thus prepares to make the most of these hours. She wants to spend all this time looking at her daughter, touching her, and taking in her presence. She also has a list of things to say to her newborn and music she wants to play for her, all while putting away all the baby things she had gathered before the diagnosis and buying a spot at a cemetery.
But baby Inés has a will to live, and she’s far from unconscious. She smiles at her mother and when a cellist visits the family Inés’s body flutters in Alina’s friend’s arms.
Let me introduce the characters. The narrator and also one of the main characters in the story is Laura. Once we get to the core of the novel, to Alina and Inés’s story, Laura’s bit about writing a dissertation in Mexico City after tying her tubes and convincing everyone that babies are not worth it, fades out of the picture. But she still hangs on in a sense, because Laura the narrator is connected to the plot by three threads: Laura and the pigeons — and one cuckoo — on her balcony, Laura and her neighbor Doris and Doris’s son Nicolás, and then Laura’s telling us the story of her friend Alina and the latter’s ordeals with her pregnancy and then not only with her baby who miraculously survives against all odds, but also with a nanny she and her husband Aurelio hire to help them with Inés.
The pigeons story is about a nest they make to lay their eggs and how one of the chicks doesn’t look like a pigeon but more like the chick of cuckoos. It’s about the old chestnut of cuckoos usurping other birds’ nests and nurturing instincts, and it’s there to foster a discussion about mothers who have to accept that even when they raise their biological offspring, the latter will be different than the mother’s initial ideas for them.
This certainly happens in Alina’s case, who learns to mourn her daughter even before she’s born, but it also describes Doris’s relationship with Nicolás, who models his father’s violent words and acts. The father is long gone from the family but Nicolás with his tantrums continues his job of slamming into Doris and taking her to her wit’s end. Laura intervenes and tries to swerve Nicolás away from his impulses, but she only succeeds so much. Eventually, Doris sends Nicolás to live with her sister, and he manages to do a turnaround there, as Doris’s sister’s messages suggest.
Where the main story really takes your breath away, however, is in the main narrative about Alina mourning her unborn child and getting ready to cope with both grief and joy at her baby’s birth, only to find herself with a baby that lives and who, despite all medical prognoses, doesn’t live like a “vegetable” either. Inés’s body quivers when she hears various sounds, such as doors or drawers closing, and she stunningly seems to listen and understand when her physical therapist is stern about her having to do difficult physical exercises.
The plot is then also fueled by the appearance of Marlene, who in many practical terms becomes Inés’s closest person, and who decides that she knows better than Alina and Aurelio what their baby needs, that, for instance, she wants to see more trees, or that she feels like taking a bath or not.
Since Marlene is so reliable and as the baby, who now does physical therapy, is bent on living, eventually Alina decides to return to her job at an arts center, which puts more pressure on her and eventually turns her feelings about her and Aurelio sharing a home with Marlene — for Marlene does end up living with them to better care for Inés — to a boiling pitch.
I’ll let you discover more of the ins and outs of the stories by yourself. It’s a short book but one packing a picture of life in stark contrasts. I’ll just mention one thing that made the whole story expand into something much more than what I shared above. It has to do with Laura’s ruminations about Buddhism and the nature of consciousness. Is the mind a function of the brain, or is it something more like a soul that attaches to the brain upon birth and doesn’t even need a whole functioning brain at that? Because for all her very severe disability, Inés responds to sounds and sights, seems to be able to understand what her physical therapist wants from her, and she even says a word: Lene.
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According to the dedication of the novel, the main story is based on the experiences of one of Nettel’s friends — with Nettel then reshaping and inventing much of it as well.
To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
HappierHealthier.Blog 