Her appetite for cutting descriptions of sex and actual violence make this short, subversive novel terrifying and hard to put down. 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.Ĭoming 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. 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… orrifying but never gratuitous Melchor uses shock to lay bare issues of classism, misogyny, and the ravages of child abuse. Impressiveįernanda 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. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Paradise is a short inexorable descent into Hell. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel.
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