Discovered by five boys wading through a canal, she lies floating beneath a “myriad of black snakes, smiling.” From there the next seven chapters crackle, each taking on the furious perspective of a new narrator who offers his or her own insights about the murder and, more importantly, the village where it happened.
Even so, I turned its final page after only a few sittings. I could barely see through the imagery, which is torrential yet constantly vivid. Sentences are pages long, and the ones that are not are often fragments. Still, Paradais is concise and streamlined enough for its few faults to be pardoned.More than once did I consider abandoning Hurricane Season (224 pages New Directions translated by Sophia Hughes), Fernanda Melchor’s first novel. The novel sometimes fall foul to plodding attempts at social commentary – the fact that Polo is a relatively poor school dropout from a broken home who spends his days on his hands and knees pruning the gardens of the uber-wealthy feels like Melchor had a big whiteboard with the words “rich vs poor”. Fatboy’s frequent rape fantasies about Señora Marián, the wife of a famous TV star whose family become victim to the boys’ plot, lead to some of the novel’s most distressing passages as Melchor ventriloquises the thoughts of a teenage incel. 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.
Paradais is a slimmer work than Hurricane Season, but Melchor hasn’t let up on the oppressive darkness and violence that pervades her work. As they wallow in their drunken teenage boredom, the boys hatch a plan to terrorise the family of one of the complex’s most famous residents. He often hangs around with Franco, usually referred to as “fatboy”, the grotesquely obese and monumentally horny grandson of a wealthy family who lives on the complex. Set in Mexico, the novel’s title refers to a luxury housing complex in which Polo, one of our main characters, is meant to be employed as a gardener, but instead spends most of his time doing literally anything else.
Just a fortnight before the publication of her latest book, Paradais, Melchor again finds herself battling it out on the longlist. A few weeks before the pandemic began, Fernanda Melchor exploded onto the English-speaking literary scene with the brutal and harrowing Hurricane Season, which rightfully earned her a place on the International Booker shortlist.
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