RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksHers is a narrator that doesn’t so much shift perspective as transmigrate among fictional bodies, recurrently losing itself in graphic vernaculars, dreamlike chains of association, and the rambling cadences of Veracruzano speech ... Translator Sophie Hughes renders this masterfully into English ... Among Spanish-language critics, Melchor is frequently heralded for her stylistic exploration of everyday speech, especially the vernacular of her native Veracruz. Melchor’s love of regionalisms and colloquial speech makes for a challenging translation. At the same time, there is something remarkably translatable about Páradais. As Melchor has noted, most Spanish-language readers wouldn’t understand her characters if they spoke the way Veracruzanos really do. Paradais is a stylistic illusion of regionalism. The original is already a translation of sorts between orality and literature, constantly playing with the difference between the way things sound and the way they are written ... The product in English, however, is an estranging, heightened awareness of a polyphonic narrative style that intermixes dialogue and description. This is aptly disquieting. Melchor (via Hughes) is not explaining the violence or misogyny of her characters. Rather, her third person narrator is speaking in tongues, serving as a medium for the subject matter. Melchor seems to be right at the scene of the crime, in the linguistic thick of things ... Albeit estranging and sometimes alarming, much of Melchor’s prose has the psychosomatic texture of the everyday rather than the exceptional ... That Fernanda Melchor sees poetic potential here is part and parcel of these recent upheavals, and the core of her work. Such shifts are not just what Melchor is writing about. The movement from smut to metaphor, the rupture between looking and looking, and the daily fact of violence constitute the poetic clearing in which Paradais sits. In this clearing, Paradais is beautiful and terrible.
