FERNANDA MELZOR
Paradise
translated by Angelika Vasilakou
ed.. House, 2023, p. 136

There is no salvation or redemption here. We will not be emotionally attached to any of the characters, we cannot sympathize with any of them.

Engulfed in the whirlpool of this incendiary novella, the reader will stop many times to ask almost aloud: “What am I reading now? What is it; “With prose that would make Cormac McCarthy feel at home and a stylist of urban violence like Jack Ketchum blush – if not suddenly look like a missionary – Fernanda Meltsor takes us by the hand and throws us into a dirty Mexican river She knows so well – into the river where the corpses of thousands of wasted lives float. Her heroes are the dregs of a desperate corner of the world and their voices are in the air, poisoning it like burning tire smoke. There is no salvation, no redemption. No and the possibilities of identification: we are not emotionally attached to any of the characters, we cannot sympathize with any of them, just as they do not sympathize with anyone – we can only walk with our mouths closed.

Meltzer is a great writer, and it is no coincidence that two of her two books – “Paradise” and the previous one – “Season of Typhoons” (also published by Doma and Aggeliki Vasilyakov) were nominated for the international Booker Prize. She is so good. Born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico, she practiced with the attention of an entomologist, listening to the insane language of her homeland, concocting an epic in the process: an epic of violence, blood, bodily fluids, deified people and denials, with an intensity and dynamic that is not easy to meet. elsewhere.

Her books are fictitious essays about fate – we have before us the pure literature of fate – an attempt (successful) not only to understand violence, but to talk with it on an equal footing, to analyze an inherently patriarchal society, mired in poverty, spiritual poverty, apathy and hatred. Meltsor makes no claims in her books, she is too modern for that. It becomes the voice of despair and explodes there. And he also becomes her hero in a way that scares you: how she, a sophisticated young Mexican writer, award-winning, widely translated, with many international collaborations, so painfully managed to portray a semi-sexual alcoholic teen sleeping on the floor. in an old house with TV playing all day, with a monster mother, with a murderous job, raised in a brutal environment of horror, blood, gangs, misogyny and violence? And to make this prose accurate, subtle, thoughtful and brilliant, as if you sprinkled it with golden dust?

The name “Paradise” represents a complex of luxurious houses. Polo, the protagonist of the book, works there as a gardener, while Marian, the sexy wife of a TV star, lives there with her two children. Franco, the same age as Polo, lives there, this rich kid, also an alcoholic, addicted to pornography, immoral to the marrow of his bones, disgusting and cruel – and obsessed: he wants to rape Marianne, his whole existence is focused on this. He wants to sleep with her, whether she wants it or not. He will easily lure Polo into the horror formed in his mind and the two of them will collapse right into the heart of darkness. Although, of course, they never came out of it, because they were born in it, forged and fermented: they are both creatures of darkness.

The book is completely out of place, and not only because of its completely free language, masterfully rendered in Greek. Also, while there are no hidden implications here—since Meltsor speaks directly, clearly, and without hiding anything about the Mexican society in question—the reader is strongly encouraged to read the book for what it really is: beyond “criticism” in a society rife with violence, before us is a stunning psychological portrait of a teenager in a state of permanent explosive shock and a masterfully constructed thriller. We suggest you read it this way.