: Guadalupe Nettel
: The Accidentals
: Fitzcarraldo Editions
: 9781804271483
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 128
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
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.

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican author of award-winning novels and short story collections. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for theatre and film. Still Born, her most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. In 2008 she received a PhD in Literature from the EHESS in Paris. She has edited cultural and literary magazines such as Número Cero and Revista de la Universidad de México. She lives in Paris as a writer in residence at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

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.

‘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 obt