[Bloomsbury; 2025]
Tr. from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
As I get older, I’ve become keenly aware of a tricky habit I have of imagining the contours, rhythms, and shapes of different, idealized versions of my life—some foreclosed to me because of a choice I did or did not make, some open to the me in the future. It’s a comfortable game I play, sometimes without even realizing it. And sometimes I extend that imagination to the people around me, imagining the life they walked out of to come into my frame of vision, the life they will walk into when they leave it. Maybe you do this, too: act as an omniscient narrator of realities based on nothing but your own projections, hopes, desires, and dreams.
Each of the characters in Guadalupe Nettel’s tightly constructed collection The Accidentals, translated into English by Rosalind Harvey, engages in this imaginative practice in one way or another. And, rather than walking away with their fantasies intact, the people who populate these stories come face to face with what if you’ve imagined it all wrong? In “Imprinting,” a young woman who feels like the family outcast meets, entirely by chance, her estranged uncle. She immediately develops an innate and deep connection with him, only to find that connection strained and severed when she realizes why he is estranged. In “Playing with Fire,” over the course of a family camping trip, a mother discovers her husband and two sons aren’t at all the people she thoughts they were. The closing story of the collection, “The Torpor,” is one of the deftest meditations on COVID that I’ve read, imagining a world fifteen years removed from when “the world changed completely, and we passed into ‘locked-down-mode….’” In the face of what has felt like an exhausting and breakneck need to “return to normal”—and without leaving room to process a mass traumatic experience, let alone acknowledging that that experience is still ongoing—“The Torpor” asks what if we never did? “At first, no one imagined this would become the norm…they made predictions about when all this would end,” the narrator tells us, as she introduces this speculative world where people spend most of their time asleep and dreaming, because dreams are the only place they can imagine lives of possibility and adventure and chance.
Nettel and Harvey have collaborated a few times, most recently on the 2023 International Book Prize shortlisted novel Still Born, and Harvey’s familiarity with the way Nettel uses language is apparent. The prose throughout this collection masterfully mirrors the feeling of suddenly not knowing exactly where you are. It is matter of fact, and with the same matter-of-factness, Nettel, via Harvey’s lovely translation, guides you to unfamiliar terrain. In some cases, she does this via an otherworldly happening: in “The Pink Door,” a sixty-three year old man walks through a mysterious door that appears where one had never been, on the other wide of which lies the opportunity to alter or rewrite the facts of his own life (and the lives of his wife and daughter). In other cases, Nettel dislocates the reader through a gradual build-up of disquieting oddities, like the slow insinuation into someone else’s life that plays out in “Life Elsewhere.” These stories “occupy a borderline between the fantastic and the real” something Nettel calls “liminal fantasy,” and there is a moment in each story when retracing the path of how you arrived seems to now be impossible; it is confounding and exhilarating. And Nettel writes the passage of time between childhood and adulthood—the most universal version of suddenly being somewhere totally new without knowing how you arrived—beautifully: “age poleaxes us all, it shuts off out senses.” This theme runs through the collection; the title story begins with the reflection:
[c]hildhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It lingers, crouching silently in our adult, then wizened bodies, until one day…it reappears with the force and speed of a lightning bolt, wounding us with its freshness, its innocence, its unerring dose of naivety, but most of all with the certainty that this really and truly is the last glimpse we shall have of it.
Nettel engages with the idea of perspective and the all-too-human impulse to wish for the things we don’t have with revelatory insight and self-assured style. I found the prose impossible to resist; it left me feeling simultaneously at home and like I was seeing something for the first time.
“The Torpor” might be the clearest example of this tension between reality and fantasy, and that is perhaps why it ends the collection. At first, the story may seem an interesting closing salvo, insofar as the preceding stories seem to warn about the dangers in imagining too many possibilities and failing to see actual reality in front of us. But in its final moments, the narrator of “The Torpor” imagines leaving her regimented and “safe” existence behind and returning to the forest where she and her husband once lived as part of an illegal commune. Even within this collection, where character after character chooses to try to change or choose to believe in their preferred narrative—often to their detriment—we are left with the image of someone seeking something more, something better, something other and something elsewhere. The narrator says, “For my part, I have begun dreaming of going back to the forest. Not to the commune, but deeper in, where only the animals live…” and it is a fitting final image, because this collection is ultimately thinking about what it means to feel connected or disconnected from our own lives. The mother in “Playing with Fire” chooses to see her youngest son as innocent and peaceful when he is in fact the antagonist vandalizing their apartment building. The family in “A Forest under the Earth” fights to keep a dying tree alive because they have decided to believe the story that the tree is a metaphor for their familial closeness, and without it they will drift apart. It doesn’t matter that they have already drifted apart; as the narrator says, “Each of us seemed to be living in a different film…” These characters are all trying to not feel so alone, in a world that is at every turn isolating and disorienting. And of course they are—we all are. Why else do we spin stories about people we’ve never met, or imagine different versions of our own lives where we are more successful, more understood, more surrounded by community and love? But I have found that this habit of mine can wound me if I’m not careful, make me long for an illusory past life or, worse, distract me from living the life I do have. What a gift this collection is: giving us a chance to meet characters we can follow down the rabbit-hole into mysterious new realities, all the while reminding us that we have only this one life.
Mary Pappalardo is an editor and writer based in Philadelphia. She is a Fiction Editor at The Offing and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life, and others.
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