The Nettle Spinner

In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hippies and idealistic students. Baking by day in the hot sun and tormented by mosquitoes and blackflies, Alma and her fellow planters relieve their backbreaking toil at night with sex, dope, and alcohol. But her brief passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer named Willem raises the ire of Karl (whose amorous attentions she has deflected in the past), and he viciously rapes her. Pregnant and alone, Alma flees to an abandoned mining camp where she and Willem once made love. There, with the help of the camp’s single weird inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby an increasingly ominous new life.

Weaving together Alma’s story with an ancient Flemish folktale about a peasant girl’s magical hold over a lustful count, Kuitenbrouwer links the power of narrative with the passion for self-realization. The Nettle Spinner is a gritty, sensuous debut that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

AUTHOR

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling author of the novels All the Broken Things, Perfecting and The Nettle Spinner. She is also the author of the story collection, Way Up. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Walrus, Maclean’s, The Lifted Brow, Significant Objects, Storyville and others. Kathryn teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

In her early twenties, Alma met a treeplanter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, with a filthy, fly-bitten crew of misfits, idealists, and transients, she works to reforest the ravaged landscape of northern Ontario. In an emotional freefall after a passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer and a vicious attack, Alma retreats, pregnant and alone, to an abandoned mining settlement. There, with the help of the camp’s single inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby a world that grows more and more ominous.

To keep terror at bay, she weaves cloth from stinging nettle fibre. Like the peasant girl in the ancient Flemish folk tale who vanquishes her seducer by weaving him a nettle shroud, Alma faces her peril, and frees herself and her child. The Nettle Spinner is a stark, vigorous, and sophisticated debut novel that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

“Brilliantly, this writer illustrates the need for an examined life. Analysis. Accountability. A responsibility that we have to the world around us, to each other, the earth beneath our feet … She manages, and often, to knock me off my feet in one sentence flat … Unconventional, dense, provocative prose.”
– Globe and Mail

“Sections of The Nettle Spinner are visceral and nasty and positively hum … Immensely satisfying, both as an elaboration of the themes Kuitenbrouwer took up in Way Up, her earlier collection of short stories, and as a contribution to the tradition of sexy Canadian fiction written by women.”
– Winnipeg Free Press

“In The Nettle Spinner, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer intertwines an old-world tale of peasant love and a count’s power with the modern story of a wayward treeplanting crew. Where the former is traditional folk tale, the latter is feral, fecund, and sexually fierce. Kuitenbrouwer is a brawny, gifted writer. The Nettle Spinner is one of those forceful, elemental novels where bliss and ache compound into an unexpected sublime.”
“Kuitenbrouwer uses a bold, unapologetic Canadian consciousness to explore existential concerns.”