A shy young Mexican woman moves to Paris to study literature. Cecilia has few friends, and a morbid fascination with watching the funerals taking place in the cemetery outside her apartment. She suddenly strikes up a close platonic relationship with her neighbour, a sickly young man who shares her interest in death and believes we can communicate with the dead. After coming to entirely depend on him for company and routine, Cecilia is left devastated by his decision to go to Sicily for his health, and is left alone in an unfriendly city once more.
Claudio, meanwhile, lives in New York with the submissive, quiet, but very wealthy Ruth. She makes few demands of him, whilst acquiescing to all his desires and indulging his obsessive, misogynistic nature. He meets Cecilia by chance whilst visiting a friend in Paris and these two very different stories collide with transformative consequences.
A shy young Mexican woman moves to Paris to study literature. Cecilia has few friends, and a morbid fascination with watching the funerals taking place in the cemetery outside her apartment. She suddenly strikes up a close platonic relationship with her neighbour, a sickly young man who shares her interest in death and believes we can communicate with the dead. After coming to entirely depend on him for company and routine, Cecilia is left devastated by his decision to go to Sicily for his health, and is left alone in an unfriendly city once more.
Claudio, meanwhile, lives in New York with the submissive, quiet, but very wealthy Ruth. She makes few demands of him, whilst acquiescing to all his desires and indulging his obsessive, misogynistic nature. He meets Cecilia by chance whilst visiting a friend in Paris and these two very different stories collide with transformative consequences.
Praise for Guadalupe Nettel:
"Nettel offers her keen attention and sympathy to any living thing struggling to get by." ―The New York Times
"Nettel has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold." ―Nick Flynn
"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." ―Le Monde
Claudio's apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself.
Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion.
In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love's inevitable loss.
In 2006, Guadalupe Nettel was voted one of the thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogotá Hay Festival. She has lived in Montreal and Paris, and is now based in Mexico City. Her previous books include Natural Histories and The Body Where I Was Born.
