PositiveJacobinIn Paradais, we have only Polo’s testimony, sometimes unfolding so deftly that it can be easy to forget it is through him that our narrative is being filtered ... The bulk of the novel has comparatively little buildup to, or mention of, this central event ... This means that the crime, when it does eventually happen, seems so random as to be surreal ... It’s even laid out, to brilliant, sickening effect, as a series of images, like stills from a film ... While effective in one way, this insistence on keeping the murder away from the foreground can mean that Paradais, though slim, sometimes feels a little digressive or slack ... Absent, too, in Paradais is the tension created by a plurality of voices which, through their discord, are able to pull the narrative along. To see shortcomings in these omissions would be to miss the point of what is so striking about Paradais: Polo’s intense disgust, even horror, toward bodies. He is repelled by fatness, oldness, even hotness, but most of all femaleness ... What’s so compelling about Melchor: she isn’t interested in moralizing — she just wants to let the tape run ... If it had been written by a man, the sheer force of this language, which seems to revel in the nastiness of its protagonist, might be taken, in the mold of Jonathan Franzen, as evidence of the author’s misogyny. Instead, most reviews have interpreted Melchor’s work as a deconstruction or examination of misogyny ... In our current cultural context, I find there’s something cleansing about Melchor’s work ... She uses the full freedom that fiction can offer to say the unsayable.
