Paradais is both more compact and more cogent [than Hurricane Season]. Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence ... From its first sentence, in fact, Paradais feels rhythmically propelled towards a violent climax. Full stops occur rarely enough to seem meaningful, Melchor using long lines of unbroken narrative to reel in her terrible ending ... The author wants to understand the violence, not merely condemn it ... The novel’s language, meanwhile, is both high-flown and street-smart, strewn with Veracruzian slang, the odd made-up word and many eye-watering expletives ... Pressure builds remorselessly to a dreadful climax. It is an extraordinary feat of control, making Fernanda Melchor’s exceptional novel into a contemporary masterpiece.
... disturbing ... [Melchor's] translator for both novels, Sophie Hughes, deserves immense credit for capturing the vitality of the prose. But fair warning that this book teems with violence: graphic and aggressive sexual fantasies, anti-gay slurs, incest, murder, torture. If you’re new to Melchor’s work, it might take several pages to adjust. Her sentences contain more clauses than seemingly feasible; single paragraphs run for pages and pages. The visual effect is daunting — an unbroken wall of text — and would perhaps be off-putting if the writing weren’t so seductive. Once you’re acclimated to both the style and the sheer rancor of the prose, you’ll notice other things: flourishes, the attention to the natural world, poetic turns of phrase, shrewd sketches of the indignities of menial labor ... Melchor’s Miltonian talent is imbuing 'evil' with psychological complexity ... the stroke of genius here is cleaving one monster into two.
With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the [Paradais and Hurricane Season] navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. And they establish Melchor, who was born in 1982, as the latest of Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable ... Paradais is a portrait of an ailing society inured to its own cruelty, and employs long paragraphs and supple sentences, always alive to the rhythms of speech. But the new novel departs from the previous one in important ways: it is more contained, less daring, less ambitious; it is, in a peculiar way, more reader-friendly ... Paradais is a study of misogyny. But Melchor is primarily a novelist, not a journalist, and there are no concessions here to any kind of reportorial completeness. We never get to know Señora Marián as anything other than Franco’s object of desire ... The novel stays stubbornly within the vantage of the two friends who plan to attack her; its narrative choices mimic their highly circumscribed empathy. Since they don’t care who Señora Marián is, in other words, the novel doesn’t care, either. Melchor must have been aware of the risks of this decision: if the novel doesn’t care, why should the reader? ... Melchor seems fascinated by the gratuitousness of violence, by the absence of any sense of responsibility.
Paradais has a tighter focus than Hurricane Season (both are superbly translated into English by Sophie Hughes). Its sentences are less breathless and serpentine, but its subject matter is equally challenging ... Incredible dark momentum ... The thematic violence of Paradais is duplicated at sentence level ... Amid this assaultive flood, however, fragments of a higher, more baroque register emerge ... These unexpected flourishes complicate the story, suggesting the presence of a less neutral narrator than much of the text has us suppose. That Melchor provides no other clue to their identity only adds to the disconcerting effect.
Hers 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.
Paradais is a slimmer work than Hurricane Season, but Melchor hasn’t let up on the oppressive darkness and violence that pervades her work. She covers many of the same themes across both books, with the toxic effects of masculinity again being the prism through which our main character’s world views refract ... The novel sometimes fall foul to plodding attempts at social commentary ... Still, Paradais is concise and streamlined enough for its few faults to be pardoned ... Excellent ... As grotesque and provocative as she is, there is something oddly soothing about finding yourself in Melchor’s sick little world.
A much slimmer, tauter book, but occupies a similar world [as Hurrican Season]. Here, though, the climax – another brutal act – happens not at the start but at the end, and we know from the opening pages who does it and why ... Paradais has the intensity of a short story, and it might seem like the escalation of events is too extreme to be truly believable.But Melchor’s prose, in Sophie Hughes’s virtuosic translation, is so potent that the story’s pace never feels outlandish ... The ferocity of the novel – and, be warned, it is a queasy read – may invite accusations of gratuitousness, but everything in it is channelled so impeccably through the minds of these two young men that the climax feels less like cartoonish horror than the logical endpoint ... Melchor – surely one of the most talented and innovative novelists around – finds nuance in the depraved and the unforgivable.
Basically, Battles in the Desert took a cryogenic nap and woke up post apocalypse as Paradais ... acidic free-indirect prose ... With Hurricane Season, Melchor adopted a spiraling structure that made its central victim (and its central perpetrator) the eye of the storm. But her new novel follows the alienated Polo on his arrow-straight path to violence. Melchor confines us to his perspective, delivered in a claustrophobic third-person soliloquy, chronological but inflected with hindsight ... From the outside, Paradais might sound like a recipe for sensationalism of a sort especially liable to be consumed by Americans, particularly those narcodrama junkies whose pants moisten at the book jacket’s promise to deliver an exploration of the 'explosive fragility of Mexican society—with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies.' If sensationalism distorts its subjects in service of fantasy, that’s a dead-on description of what Franco is up to; his repulsive pipe dreams of power and virility are cribbed straight from the videos he binges. But Melchor is not responsible for that distortion, only for documenting it. She exposes Franco’s delusion by miring herself in it. Paradais proves J. M. Coetzee’s point that it is 'hard, perhaps impossible, to make a novel that is recognisably a novel out of the life of someone who is from beginning to end comfortably sustained by fictions. We make a novel only by exposing those fictions' ... It is precisely this awkwardness that animates Melchor’s depictions of violence and underlines its degradation ... If what Sergio González Rodríguez termed the 'femicide machine' likes to work in the dark, Melchor shines an inspector’s flashlight on its greasy gears. She does not fix it or throw a wrench in it; she scrutinizes it up close, as if to see if it will malfunction under pressure, perhaps even setting the flashlight down to man the machine herself. Her hands get dirty—but no dirtier than the reader’s, holding the book, laughing at its cruel humor, wincing hypocritically when that humor metamorphoses into violence.
Life’s blights are always conveyed from within her characters’ minds, mostly in free indirect style, mixed with direct or reported speech. Melchor has created a lusciously carnal brand of orality (as she has pointed out, few would understand the way Veracruzans really talk). One novel has no paragraph breaks at all, and her sentences can be extremely long, in an overarching past tense that makes a change from the primacy of the present in contemporary fiction ... If her work risks airlessness with its identity of form and content – violent experience expressed in violent language – it makes up for this with an irresistible propulsive energy ... reads more easily than its predecessor, lacking Hurricane’s bewildering profusion. But it is slighter: the narrator is eaten by resentment, something necessarily repetitive ... their refusal to comfort or spare the reader in any way is what makes them so exciting seen from an Anglo-American panorama where the redemptive and uplifting threaten to kill us with kindness.
... a slim but no less powerful read ... provocative and terrifying ...Melchor’s feverish prose is fierce and all consuming, written in long sentences and paragraphs with a stream-of-consciousness orality that is intense to read, profane and often highly disturbing. The experience of reading this short book is both shocking and energising, but it’s worth noting that, while disconcerting, Melchor’s furious scrutiny of both misogyny and capitalism is never gratuitous. Here Melchor proves again how expertly she can tap into the human experience. With Paradais her story washes over the reader in a relentless torrent in way that feels wholly original and, ultimately, revelatory.
The profanities, automatic and disposable, regain their luster: By parading next to words removed from the daily register...the author forces us to read her novel with the concentration we reserve for poetry ... This is a book that turns the ordinary into something strange, the vulgar (in its double meaning, popular and obscene) into art.
If in Hurricane Season she seemed primarily concerned with language and form, in Paradais she appears more interested in content and message. While Hurricane Season was often subtle, the new book is blunt, narrated through a free indirect discourse that doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to her protagonist’s inner monologue ... Given its violent plot, there is little doubt that Paradais is a morality play, a story about the muchacho’s descent into evil. But it is also a searing critique of class, one that seems to espouse a kind of determinism equidistant from Karl Marx and Juan Rulfo. And so we have to ask: Was it all fated? Was Polo’s situation truly so hopeless that this was the only exit? One could imagine a slightly different story, one in which the muchacho’s hatred for the rich led him to activism or organizing of one sort or another—perhaps even into guerrilla struggle—rather than to the killing of children. But in the Veracruz of Melchor’s imagination, there seems to be no place for emancipatory politics. Her characters never consider the possibility that their private disasters might be the product of public injustice, let alone that the answer to those disasters might be collective rather than individual ... This lack of collective consciousness is surprising, given that Mexico is a rather politicized place and Melchor a writer of fundamentally political concerns. But the absence of explicit political action in her books is not a matter of omission; she is making a point. Though Mexico these days has a government that purports to be leftist, the truth is that the country’s social ills, from violence to poverty, have only grown more bitter since the defeat of neoliberalism in the 2018 presidential election. The fatalism of Melchor’s characters, their inability or unwillingness to see their world as contingent, is the product of a disillusionment so deep that holding on to the optimism of the will that proves necessary for any leftist struggle is often impossible. It doesn’t matter whether the president in Mexico City is a corrupt neoliberal or a charismatic left populist: In Veracruz today, as when Hernán Cortés founded the port half a millennium ago, paradise remains the private property of the rich ... Melchor offers no answers—but an accurate diagnosis of the disease is often the first step toward a cure.
You might call Melchor’s rhetorical approach the American Psycho gambit — suffuse the narrative in so much repulsiveness and grotesqueries, in so many sinuous run-on sentences, that eventually it makes a moral argument against the kind of violence the narrative is wallowing in ... This slim, angry, relentless book has a moral vision as stark and clear as its prose. Part of the reason why it works is because Melchor uses language not only to convey Polo’s rage — its intensity reveals how much he’s straining to conceal the sources of his anger ... Paradais is as engrossing as it is discomfiting. Sophie Hughes’ translation gives Melchor’s candid, lurid run-on sentences a galloping pace; nothing is softened or made more graceful, but the prose is insistent and propulsive while the story accrues guns and rapes and murder. Yet (contra Ellis) the mood Melchor conjures and the trajectory of her story are both unmistakably tragic.
In 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.
... slim but ravaging ... exquisitely translated ... grotesque and unflinching ... Though it is essential to add that after masterfully building the suspense, Melchor writes the scene without taking a breath, unleashing a torrent of language that captures the fear and rage of her characters. The violence of the scene is replicated in her language which is filled with abusive and misogynistic slurs ... Women characters seem to lack control on the surface level of the novel, but Melchor’s prose also reveals how influential women are in the lives of Polo and Franco, how their very existence—or lack thereof— dictates the boys’ futures ... In her horror writing, Melchor fuses the mythological and contemporary influences that characterize present-day Latin America.
Those familiar with Hurricane Season will recognize Melchor’s voice and style (or rather, Hughes’s rendering of them) at once: rich and winding sentences woven through breathless page-long paragraphs; filthy, slang-ridden spoken language; a cinematic gaze that doesn’t shy away from extreme violence, rape, disenfranchisement, or social inequality; haunted houses and men who fear the women who live inside them (as they ultimately fear most women) ... While the novel can be read in one sitting, it is not easy to take it all in at once, to stare (sexual) violence directly, intensely, helplessly in the face ... We aren’t allowed to look away from the horror he sees. It’s a bold narrative move, and Melchor goes there, unafraid to analyze misogyny at its source and pull the reader with her—to look through the lens of, rather than at, toxic masculinity ... Melchor makes evident how violence and misogyny touch all corners of society, even the communities thought to be protected by physical gates, security guards, and money. Of course, it happens even in Paradise.
Melchor writes about these matters in about the least glutted, least ugly way one can. Violence in Paradais...isn’t a narrative trick but a reflection of reality ... A unique talent of Melchor’s [is] to make the third-person voice feel miraculously close to a character’s consciousness, so much so that one often forgets the book isn’t in first-person, that Polo isn’t really talking ... You won’t get justice. Fernanda Melchor’s view from Paradais is one of grim brutality, unpunished and unequal ... Melchor delivers us to her fool’s paradise with merciless precision, stripped of narrative luxuries like vengeance or confession, and instead debarking for a land where violence is simply a descriptive feature.
Macabre characters drive the plot and slithering syntax the prose, guiding Melchor’s tale into the shadows of a society locked by chains ... Between the basic instincts and curdled socialization that boil the plot, the story’s thrill only grows in catastrophic momentum ... Melchor’s prose undulates with shifting clauses and semantic chaos ... Melchor has added a necessary work to the gothic genre resonant with the social fragilities of today's Mexico, the geopolitical vulnerability it speaks to defiant of aesthetic pretensions and moralistic conclusions. Amidst the black river that flows out in the margins of the sea, the relations between characters who populate the world's parasitic tendencies, and the cavernous fate to which the protagonists are brought, there is no redemption in this paradise lost.
Violence in Paradais, and in her 2020 novel Hurricane Season, isn’t a narrative trick but a reflection of reality ... All action, all characterization, all dialogue comes with the hedge and shade of a teenage boy trying to save himself ... This all serves to showcase what is a unique talent of Melchor’s, to make the third-person voice feel miraculously close to a character’s consciousness, so much so that one often forgets the book isn’t in first-person ... You won’t get justice. Fernanda Melchor’s view from Paradais is one of grim brutality, unpunished and unequal ... Melchor delivers us to her fool’s paradise with merciless precision, stripped of narrative luxuries like vengeance or confession, and instead debarking for a land where violence is simply a descriptive feature.
Exhilerating ... Brilliant and blinding ... Gushes forth in vigorous and brooding narration ... What makes Melchor's fiction so enthralling is the fortified complexity of her sentences, again under the superb stewardship of translator Sophie Hughes. They are intricate and cyclical, exhibiting a deep understanding of gender violence. Melchor ruminates on moment after disturbing moment ... Short and potent, Paradais forcefully casts aside flippant cliches like 'boys will be boys' with chilling consequence.
[Melchor] develops a convincing case that we should all be thinking a lot more about what happens under the squirming, sweaty skins of teenage boys ... a torrent of piss and shit and blood and semen, but for all its visceral realism it also possesses a mythic quality.
Through the alchemy of translation, Sophie Hughes has reinterpreted the local slang of Melchor’s Mexican Spanish. The result is a linguistic marvel: a hybrid English that jumps between British and American dialects; a bastard tongue situated somewhere between LA pulp and something out of James Kelman. It’s a risky choice with an immense payoff ... isn’t a novel about the effects of gender violence; it’s a novel about the people who enact it ... ends on a despairing note, with Polo’s circumstances unchanged, his hopes unveiled as shams. It’s a fitting end to an unsparing work.
Nightmarish ... This novel is told in long sentences and paragraphs, lending it a fever-dream quality that is, at its most intense, almost sickening. Also like its predecessor, it’s filled with harsh profanity, violence, and disturbing sex; even the most open-minded will find it difficult to read in parts. But there’s nothing exploitative here—it’s horrifying but never gratuitous; Melchor uses shock to lay bare issues of classism, misogyny, and the ravages of child abuse. 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. This might be a deeply disconcerting novel, but it’s also a brave one ... A fever dream that's as hard to read as it is brilliant.
