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. Just a fortnight before the publication of her latest book, Paradais, Melchor again finds herself battling it out on the longlist.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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”. Still, Paradais is concise and streamlined enough for its few faults to be pardoned.
With two excellent novels now available in English, Fernanda Melchor has more than proven herself to be one of the most unmissable voices in translation. As grotesque and provocative as she is, there is something oddly soothing about finding yourself in Melchor’s sick little world.
