"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell."
"Melchor’s brilliant, sinewy, streetwise second novel turns on a couple of young men in a Mexican town whose lusts take a violent turn...Melchor’s telling is psychologically revealing, finding ever deeper reservoirs of rage and dread in its characters."
The Los Angeles Times - Mark Athitakis
"Paradais warns against considering any luxurious abode as “safe” when the mere existence of such enclaves intensifies the inequalities that will eventually lead to their own demise. "
"Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is brutal poetry, distilled."
03/07/2022
The intense latest from Mexican writer Melchor (Hurricane Season ) follows two teenage boys in the Yucatán united by their disparate longings. The story is mostly that of Polo, who is angry and directionless after failing out of high school and spurned by his criminal older cousin and “almost a brother” Milton after attempting to get work with him. Instead, he serves as gardener in a gated community, where he meets Franco Andrade, a pampered but troubled overweight delinquent occasionally beaten by his father. In the boys’ time together, drinking excessive amounts of booze paid for by Franco and secured by Polo, Franco spouts expansively about his lust for new neighbor Señora Marián. Polo is amused by Franco’s delusional obsession—which Melchor renders unflinchingly in a pungent anthem of masturbatory fantasies—and disgusted by the Señora, whom he sees as attention-seeking for her lycra pants and cleavage. He’s still a boy—he’s terrified by the local legend of the Bloody Countess, the ghost of a Spanish colonist who was beaten to death—but wants to be a man and to gain acceptance from Milton, as Franco grows increasingly desperate for the Señora. Their plan, hinted at throughout and revealed only at the end, comes off as wildly absurd and sadly plausible. Once again, this writer impresses and disturbs. (Mar.)
"Fernanda 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."
"Paradais stars a luxury housing complex's beleaguered gardener, who's driven by one of its residents to follow his worst impulses. Melchor's prose is singular, with its fair share of page-long sentences that travel from the deepest psychic corners of her characters to the broadest panoramas of Mexican life."
"Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive"
The New York Times - Julian Lucas
"Without moralizing, the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor’s novels look unflinchingly at cruelty and poverty. Her work is a model for how to think about the ambiguity of human relations."
Jacobin Magazine - Holly Connelly
"Fernanda Melchor’s prose is like no one else’s: it’s a torrent of words and feelings, violent at times, and it’s impossible to look away."
"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."
Cleveland Review of Books - Henry Hietala
"Paradais stars a luxury housing complex's beleaguered gardener, who's driven by one of its residents to follow his worst impulses. Melchor's prose is singular, with its fair share of page-long sentences that travel from the deepest psychic corners of her characters to the broadest panoramas of Mexican life."
"[Melchor's] honest and fearless resolve to capture the rawness of contemporary Mexican society is nothing but inspiring."
"Coming 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. Her appetite for cutting descriptions of sex and actual violence make this short, subversive novel terrifying and hard to put down."
Vulture - Jessica Jacolbe
"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. 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."
The New York Times - Benjamin P. Russell
"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Paradise is a short inexorable descent into Hell."
"Set in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz….Melchor’s latest novel, Paradais , is more tightly focused—employing not a chorus of narrators but a duet."
The Nation - Lucas Iberico Lozada
"Melchor offers a study of the pathologies of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—and does so in prose laced with both high diction and the vernacular."
The Nation - Nicolas Medina Mora
"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. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made. "
The New Yorker - Juan Gabriel Vásquez
"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 is an incredibly gifted writer."
The New York Times Book Review - Justin Torres
‘Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell.’Things We Lost in the Fire
‘Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive.’ New York Times
‘With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, [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.’New Yorker
‘Fernanda 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.’Fever Dream
‘A masterpiece of concision ... Paradais is a labyrinthine monologue on the banal violence of a modern-day teenager.’Vernon Subutex
‘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.’ Kirkus
★ 2021-12-24
With her second novel to be translated into English, following Hurricane Season (2020), Mexican author Melchor proves that she’s got nightmares to spare. This slim volume follows Polo, a gardener in a posh housing development who spends his evenings getting drunk and chain-smoking cigarettes with Franco, the grandson of two of the complex’s residents. Polo can’t stand Franco, not just because of his family’s wealth, but because of his incessant fantasizing about Marián Maroño, another resident of the development and the wealthy wife of a TV personality. Polo only attends their nightly meetings out of boredom and because he can’t stand his own home, where he lives with his hectoring mother and a pregnant cousin who won’t stop flirting with him. He doesn’t get Franco’s obsession with Marián, whom he considers “a whore, a gold digger” with an “unbearable family, a bunch of smug pricks who thought the world revolved around them.” Polo is so desperate to escape his home that when Franco reveals a plan that will both enrich Polo and realize Franco’s most far-fetched sexual fantasies, the young gardener says he’ll go along with it, perhaps unaware of how serious his drinking companion is: “Who could have known he really meant what he said?” 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. 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.
