Through the alchemy of translation, Sophie Hughes has reinterpreted the local slang of Melchor’s Mexican Spanish. Justin Torres - The New York Times Book Review Her novels are less portraits of Mexico than they are literary MRIs, probing unseen corners of the human heart and finding that many of its darker shades are universal. While her writing turns an unsparing eye on the dysfunction and violence of her native Veracruz, Melchor makes clear that it is neither her job nor her intention to explain her homeland.
All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made. With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the books navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex…In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. Her appetite for cutting descriptions of sex and actual violence make this short, subversive novel terrifying and hard to put down. Her prose, ably translated by Hughes, is dizzying but effective it’s as if she’s holding the reader’s head and daring them to look away from the social problems she brings to light.Ĭoming off her last novel, Hurricane Season, Melchor has proven to be one of Mexico’s most tantalizing writers, and Paradais continues her examination into the metaphysical assault embedded in patriarchy and classism. Like Hurricane Season, this novel is told in long sentences and paragraphs, lending it a fever-dream quality that is, at its most intense, almost sickening… orrifying but never gratuitous Melchor uses shock to lay bare issues of classism, misogyny, and the ravages of child abuse.
Impressiveįernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Paradise is a short inexorable descent into Hell. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty.
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