Después del invierno
Guadalupe Nettel
NOVEL | 2014 | 272 pages
2014 HERRALDE NOVEL PRIZE
A man and a woman tell the story of their lives. Claudio is Cuban, lives in New York, and works at a publishing house. Cecilia is Mexican, lives in Paris, and is a student. He holds onto memories of his past in Havana and the pain of the loss of his first girlfriend as well as his complicated relationship with Ruth. She remembers her tough teenage years, and her friend Haydée encourages her to get rid of those fears and start enjoying her life. Cecilia has a relationship with Tom, a boy with frail health who shares her fondness for walking in cemeteries.
During a trip to Paris, Claudio and Cecilia’s destinies collide. As both characters describe their daily lives in detail in Paris and New York, their neuroses, passions, phobias, and the past that has shaped their fears surface. They explain how they met and the circumstances that made them like each other, love each other, and even hate each other intermittently.
With an acute style and wit, After the Winter—at times humorous and at times touching—explains how love and relationships function. The novel has also a soundtrack including Nick Drake, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett or Las horas by Philip Glass. This adds music to the pages where not only happiness and pain can be felt, but also the feeling of facing death and new life, and the acknowledgment of the idea that life goes on and cannot be stopped. Claudio and Celia’s love story is part of a bigger story, which represents an important period in their lives. Each follows a path marked by encounters and absences, doubts and the search for certainty, guided by their desires and sorrows. Circumstances immerse them both into the depths of their psyches in order to find the key of how to deal not only with others but also with themselves, and if possible, to find their own oasis of happiness.
Guadalupe Nettel’s novel is forthright, ambitious and unusual. It digs into the universe of those who live on the fringe, in bewilderment and unconformity. With this book Nettel becomes one of the essentials voices of contemporary Latin American Literature.
RIGHTS: spanish (world) EDITORIAL ANAGRAMA | english (usa) COFFEE HOUSE PRESS | english (uk) MACLEHOSE PRESS | italian EINAUDI | german BLESSING VERLAG | french BUCHET/CHASTEL | dutch SIGNATUUR | norwegian SOLUM | bulgarian TONIPRESS | russian ARKADIA | portuguese (brazil) TODAVIA LIVROS | turkish LIVERA
“Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.”
“A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.”
“Don’t take your eyes off this writer, because the recurrent description of her as a ‘sensation of Latin American literature’ has the air of truth around it…When you realize that you carry the dead inside you, you want to read more by Guadalupe Nettel, which, I suppose, is the best thing you can say about a writer and a literary adventure…Nettel knows what she is capable of doing, and she puts petals and thorns on every rose. Passions, phobias, and fears make the characters crash against each other, as if they were billiard balls. Suddenly, a spark of tenderness, desire, and passion appears…all described with a lot of talent. With words that breathe and characters that rise from the page as well ghosts that live within them (like Vallejo or Cortázar in Paris), everything is twisted and personal, typical in Nettel’s world, which only she knows…A book that creates a disturbing and terrifying effect on the reader, almost like a walk on a rainy day through a graveyard.”
“Without any morbidity, she weaves a story of troubled sentimentality, carrying with it a wise combination of emotional suspense and dramatic adversities… An excellent novel.”
“Nettel has stopped being one of the best kept secrets of contemporary Mexican literature in order to become a writer who has managed to build a completely personal world, which draws from the disturbing, from the strange—let’s call it the nebulous—from the frozen whisper of an imperfect and painful reality, where failure and death become a map that must be followed.”
“Love, illness, death, abandonment, and re-encounters accompany us throughout a novel that is narrated with a calmness that, like silence, underlines the intensity of feelings that end up overwhelming us.”
“Nettel has cast her incisive gaze on the biggest of the mysteries that govern us: relationships. Claudio, a Cuban, and Cecilia, a Mexican, meet in Paris, and an exploration full of pleasures and shadows emerges.”
“It is important to point out the spontaneous freshness of the prose, and the fine descriptions of the two cities, New York and Paris, which are its settings.”
“Her novels constitute an epic of life, while accepting the final desolation of defeat. Después del invierno is the culmination of this epic, a melody of the melancholy of living, whose emblem is recognizable in a short quote from the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who appears in many pages of the novel: ‘imperfect beings in an imperfect world, we are destined to find only crumbs of happiness’... The meaning of life can be encountered in Vallejo’s poetry, in the sound of the trumpet on Miles Davis´s Kind of Blue, orin the piano on Keith Jarrett´s Dark Intervals, as crumbs of happiness are secretly reached.”
BY GUADALUPE NETTEL:
Los divagantes
STORIES, 2023
La hija única
NOVEL, 2020
Después del invierno
NOVEL, 2014
El matrimonio de los peces rojos
STORIES, 2013
El cuerpo en que nací
NOVEL, 2011
Pétalos y otras historias incómodas
STORIES, 2008
El huésped
NOVEL, 2006