A man guards the birth of his son. He attends fascinated to know the gestation. What is observed grows and takes note of each finding. Over the course of a year, he narrates the first bars of the existence of that child who transforms him and his wife. If in 'Fractura' Andrés Neuman focused on the weight of a tragedy and what it produces in people's lives, in 'Umbilical' (Alfaguara) he proposes one of his most personal books, including a prenatal memory of the life of his son through his experience as a father. The winner of the 2009 Alfaguara award proposed an alternative reading of fatherhood and places masculinity in front of the miracle of life. He tells it in a diary in which he breaks down, divided into three parts or chapters, the wait, the arrival and the growth of a son. How is paternity lived and meant compared to the experience of the mother? What does a man have to say at the birth of a child? "That question was the starting point for this book," he replies suddenly, with wonder and sweetness. “But I didn't have any forceful answer. What does a man whose biological and cultural reasons presuppose us more or less far away have to sens? I was making little intimate discoveries about it,” he explained. “I had to go feeling. I discovered that the physical, emotional and even intuitive relationship could be much more intense. We live in a period of rethinking the literature of maternity and that led me to think what is the place of the father”. This search is amplified in the conversation, especially when taking into account the place of the father in the history of human literature. “There is a lot of parenting literature, but there is little about parents with babies. The father's literature tends to go on the punishing or avenging side, even absent. Let's say that it is a literature of the bad father, the Kafka model. What interested me were the possibilities of writing. Think with words a pre-verbal part of my son, but also his own”. The motifs «I am born when I tell you», Plasma Neuman in these pages. The use of the diary and the slow craftsmanship of personalized sentiments make this book a collection of poems, sometimes; also in a diary full of emotion, humor and perplexity. Three issues pushed him to write 'Umbilical'. Or at least that's how he tells it: “find out what the place of parents is in the first years of life”; The director himself has met his son as "that future talker" that he will know to have through his third father from his first memories and a mission on "how we narrate that unspoken, unremembered and non-verbal part of our own memory. "It is a literary task, because literature seeks impossible points of view." Reading the book proposes a double gestation. That of the child and that of those who expect it. “You learn to love while you don't come; here is the other gestation. You are an imminence that captures the house, the order of things that will soon be moved and, stealthily, they say goodbye to their previous functions. Likewise, you travel through the maternal realm, announcing, invisible, the sacred violence of every perspective”, she writes in song 32 of 'Umbilical', corresponding to the first part 'El imaginedo'. That is, the child who has not yet arrived. The father who is not yet. No slogans “There are many commonplaces about fatherhood and motherhood. Procreation is highly codified. Many of those preconceived ideas fell away one after the other. We have had a static version of fatherhood, because little is written about it. This book is written against all those slogans”, Andrés Neuman explained when addressing the nature of this book. “If I could know what hurts you, I would be more than a father.” The burdens and worries. The fear and joy of protecting someone branch out throughout the book. All those fibers of feeling are manifested in the pages of 'Umbilical'. “It reveals to me the money that is not enough for you to have everything. No one can or should have everything (…) Crouching in the background, money waits for you to fall asleep to take away my sleep”. Hybrid Andrés Neuman is a hybrid creature. It mixes nationalities, accents and literary genres. He was born and spent his childhood in Buenos Aires. The son of exiled Argentine musicians, he moved with his family to Granada, where he worked as a professor of Latin American literature at the university. He was a finalist for the Herralde award with his first novel, Bariloche, which was followed by 'Life in the windows', 'Once Argentina', 'The traveler of the century' (Alfaguara award and Critics Award), 'Speak alone ' and 'Fractured'. He has published storybooks such as 'Alumbramiento' or 'Playing dead'; the satirical dictionary 'Barbarismos'; the Latin American travel diary 'How to travel without seeing'; and the treatise on the body 'Sensitive Anatomy'.
