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He lives in a poor neighborhood near the coast of Veracruz where there’s a gang that strikes such fear into civilians that they refer to its members only as aquellos a group of gang members abducts Milton from in front of his home and interrogates him with electric shocks until he pees himself Then they give the terrified kid clean clothes and send him out on his first job as a professional killer knocking delivery drivers off their motorbikes making off with the bikes one by one until only Milton and the boss They pull onto an unpaved road at the edge of the city “Flick the safety off,” El Sapo says to Milton his pistol trained on the kid even while he’s handing him another pistol from his waistband reina y madre de misericordia.” Milton completes the prayer in his head: Vida He fires off four shots — his first murder This is one of the most shocking sequences in Fernanda Melchor’s latest novel who heard it from a taxi driver — which is typical for this friend whom Melchor calls “the taxi psychologist.” (“He gets in the cab and the driver starts going off.”) The main difference between reality and Melchor’s version is that in Paradais the taxi driver doesn’t live to tell the tale “A lot of what I do is go to Veracruz and listen to what people are saying There are a million things worth writing just based on that.” Melchor’s books feature characters who are more than victims and villains even when depicting violence in extreme detail She shows instead how ordinary these episodes have become — and that makes them even scarier Her breakthrough novel, Hurricane Season was published in English translation in 2020 and opens with a group of children discovering the gas-bloated corpse of a witch lying in an irrigation canal before working backward to uncover the small-town drama that led to this Melchor publishes the English-language version of Paradais which is set primarily in a world she knows intimately: a Veracruz luxury development insulated from its surroundings by barbed wire and security guards reconstructed the setting from memories of birthday parties and after-school hangouts with wealthier friends from her private high school — “the kind of people whose parents owned hotels.” But there’s nothing distinctly Mexican about a gated community It’s a universal feature of any place with a distended wealth gap Melchor has a ventriloquist’s flair for dialogue that makes her characters crackle and pop thanks to translator Sophie Hughes.) She writes in a close third person in paragraph-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs in a voice that shifts subtly to match the character she’s trained on at any given moment it feels like you’re simultaneously inside and outside a character’s head experiencing in high definition the pathos that drives each (usually bad) decision and the chain reaction set off as a result a New Yorker contributor and author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books first met Melchor at the Guadalajara Book Fair He was struck by her choice to live in Puebla — “a laudable distance from the literary world” — and by her magnetism and it feels like you’re in a thunder-and-lightning storm,” says Goldman it’s like she just burns and burns and burns and never runs out the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada published a call for young journalists to submit essays on the subject of vigilante justice with a promise to print the winning entries Melchor was 19 and in her second year of journalism school at the University of Veracruz frustrated by her professors who never sent students into the field journalism is something you only learn by doing it,” she says she imagined herself as a writer of crónica a Latin American nonfiction genre that draws on the interpretative storytelling of literature the kind of gossip that gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in the proverbial town square As Melchor contemplated what to submit to the essay contest she was reminded of an incident that had happened six years prior in a remote village near the Veracruz-Oaxaca border: Residents of Tatahuicapan (population 236) had accused a man of attempting to rape and then murdering a woman the woman’s friends and family members tied the man to a tree then doused him with gasoline and set him on fire The townspeople didn’t see this as a lynching: They’d formed their own sentencing committee collecting nearly 200 signatures from neighbors in favor of this punishment They even taped the process with a VHS camcorder and the video ended up in the morning news on the national network TV Azteca only the state is supposed to prosecute people where the overwhelming majority of femicides go unpunished the episode looked like a blow against impunity so she called up an older journalism student what the guy really wanted was to sleep with me,” she says “but we ended up doing great work.” Her story won second place in the contest A reedited version of that piece appears in Melchor’s 2011 collection Aquí No Es Miami (“This Is Not Miami”) she stresses that although the work is based on vigorous reporting journalism is still tied to this old-school fantasy that journalists can be fully objective as if you could become this floating eye with no body and no ideology of your own,” she says now What you have to do is use your subjectivity and take advantage of it.” For years Melchor haunted the cantinas and drug dens of Veracruz where dock workers would regale her with local lore She kept a file of stories that might serve as writing prompts — first as a binder of clippings Soon she decided to return to it: In 2013 she published her first novel was inspired by a story from the nota roja The news story was about a man who murdered someone he believed was a witch; he was convinced the witch had cast a spell on his wife “The story wasn’t just the putrefied corpse with its throat slit—that’s the least interesting part — but the love triangle behind it.” The novel she wrote takes place within the bounds of one mosquito-bitten Veracruz village charged with an atmosphere of misogyny and homophobia rhythmically baroque street slang of jarochos Melchor’s sentences are packed with regionalisms There’s a scene where one prisoner taunts another o te caes con los cacles o te lleva la verga.” Hughes’s English translation: “Cocksucker give me your fucking shoes or I’ll fuck your ass so hard you won’t know what day it is.” Working backward from the book’s climactic murder Melchor reveals the mind-warping effects of living in a toxic miasma We learn that the witch who was killed was trans and a folk healer; she lived alone in a house rumored to hide priceless treasure The book’s characters face both crushing deprivation and constant reproach at not behaving as a real man Melchor reproduced the language of machismo she’s been hearing her whole life “When I found out they were going to translate Hurricane Season to English what if people read this book and think that I’m the misogynist “I feel quite adamant that there is no poverty porn in this book,” Hughes says of Hurricane Season “Here’s an author who’s trying to show us where violence might stem from how the kernels of hatred begin in a particular setting She’s the one who’s going to the effort to try and unpick the seeds that come in to the lives of these people it’s an act of generosity.” Writing this way takes its toll “It was like swatting a hornet’s nest,” she says “It detonated a series of emotions and conflicts inside me that I wasn’t ready to feel or even admit to myself.” Having exploded on the scene with a book in which violence and poverty are linked Melchor wanted to write about how evil transcends class an upstairs-downstairs novel told from the perspective of two teenagers whom Melchor jokingly referred to as “tropical Beavis and Butt-head”: Franco an emotionally stunted porn addict who lives in the upscale housing development They have nothing in common except that Polo’s old enough to buy booze and Franco’s got money to pay for it they drink themselves blind in an abandoned mansion — one inspired by a house that a teenage Fernanda and her friends used to call the “Casa del Diablo,” where they would take mushrooms and dance to techno until dawn the boys believe it’s haunted by the Bloody Countess a colonial aristocrat killed as revenge for kidnapping and torturing enslaved boys and men an homage to one of Mexico’s most widely read novels: José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert about a Mexico City teen who falls in love with his best friend’s mother Whereas Pacheco only alludes to carnal desire who spends his days locked in his air-conditioned room “farting and watching porn on his new laptop,” becomes obsessed with his married next-door neighbor Señora Marián; he thinks she makes his favorite porn star seem like “your average crack whore” by comparison Polo is stuck sleeping on a straw mat in a house he shares with his mother and his older female cousin So the two hatch a cockamamie plan to get what they each want Melchor spent a lot of her teenage years around boys like these She would have once compared herself to Beverly Marsh or Eleven from Stranger Things — the one girl who hangs out with the guys This had once been her way of finding acceptance and to escape the stigma of being a tomboy she began to question why she always gravitated toward men why they were the mystery she was trying to solve The stakes of that question became much higher several years ago when she became the stepmother to her partner’s young daughter “I never saw how we reproduce verbal violence from one generation to the next without realizing it so for me this was an opportunity to break the cycle,” she says “I grew up thinking I was a second-class citizen and I didn’t want her to grow up like that Señora Marián and the Bloody Countess represent what she sees as the two faces of patriarchy: desire and fear toward women and their reproductive capacity,” she says “It’s like that dumb joke: ‘How can you trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die?’ ” The book envisions a nightmare scenario of what could happen when those forces are allowed to build until they burst Melchor worried that it could become pornographic; she scrapped the end of the book twice before she nailed it drinking while she wrote to make herself confront it She’s already thinking about the kind of story she might tell next time “I want to write a tragedy that doesn’t necessarily resolve as a tragedy Hair and makeup by Felix Stößer for Basics Berlin By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us Password must be at least 8 characters and contain: you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York