Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (tr. Sophie Hughes)
Review by Eleanor Updegraff
In the murky world of Fernanda Melchor’s fiction, Paradise is a housing estate. Or, to be exact, a luxury gated compound in Mexico, the well-heeled residents of which lead air-conditioned, manicured lives a world away from those of the staff employed to tend their houses, lawns, children and bodies. So unattainable is Paradise for all but this fortunate minority that Polo, a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout who works there as a gardener, is unable even to pronounce its name: Paradais, a colleague tries to teach him, thereby lending the novel its title. Yet as impregnable as it may seem at times, the veil between these two worlds is easily ripped. All it takes is one misguided decision, and Paradise proves to be just another circle of Hell.
‘It was all fatboy’s fault, that’s what he would tell them.’ The opening sentence of Paradais, Melchor’s second novel to appear in English, is uncharacteristically short for a writer whose building blocks are long, fluid sentences and paragraphs that run to pages – yet it holds within it a promise that will keep the reader gripped for the duration of this brief and furious novel. ‘He’ is main protagonist Polo, while ‘fatboy’ refers to Franco Andrade, a young delinquent who lives with his grandparents in the Paradise estate and develops an unhealthy obsession with his neighbour, Señora Marián. When Polo and Franco strike up a speculative friendship, based largely on the alcohol Franco is able to buy for them, the unfortunate wife and mother becomes the focal point of a violent plan that we know from the outset can only end in catastrophe. Yet it is precisely this growing sense of horror – which begins as unease but soon mounts into something far more terrifying – that makes Paradais such a mesmerising work of fiction, a novel that is felt far more than it is simply read.
Like its predecessor, Hurricane Season, which was also masterfully translated by Sophie Hughes, Paradais uses language to stunning effect: all manner of expletives, insults and bodily fluids, not to mention graphic depictions of violence and pornography, come together in a wall of words that seems intent on overwhelming its reader. It succeeds, quickly, and, thus trapped in the novel’s savage flow, we find ourselves powerless to do anything but watch as events unfold. It is an unsettling experience, this, but a necessary one too: as Melchor so deftly shows us, this must be what it feels like to be Polo, trapped in a vicious circle of poverty and violence in which joining one of the narco gangs seems to be the only way out. As he later learns from his cousin Milton, drug trafficking is not the path to redemption – but nor, admittedly, is Paradise.
This sense of being brutally ensnared will be familiar to readers of Hurricane Season, though the narrative focus of Paradais is considerably tighter, limited to Polo and the small world he inhabits. Other characters circle in the peripheral gloom: Franco’s grandparents, Polo’s mother and his cousin Zorayda, who is pregnant with a child he already despises and may or may not have fathered, and Polo’s grandfather, who exists now in memory only and with whom he had once planned to build a boat. Outside working hours, when not drinking to excess in a dilapidated mansion on the fringes of the jungle beyond Paradise, Polo can often be found in the vicinity of the river he imagines would have carried him and his grandfather to freedom. Towards the novel’s climax, this muddy waterway does indeed seem to promise salvation – but the world Melchor narrates is a cruel one, and Hell, it is well known, is composed of circles.
At just over a hundred pages, Paradais is a short, sharp shock of a novel best read in one sitting – it is impossible, in any case, to look away. With its savage language, cruel imbalances of power and a plot that centres on mindless violence, it does require a strong stomach, yet Melchor’s raging sentences are tempered by moments of almost surreal beauty: rain falling in the dense foliage around the house where Franco and Polo drink, the tantalising scent of freedom carried on the river. What’s more, its hypnotic hold on the reader lies in the way we are brought to sympathise with rather than condemn Polo, a young man caught up in something much larger than he is, as trapped within the currents of circumstance as we are in the swift pace of the narrative.
For the reader, of course, there comes an end, and perhaps also for Polo – though, in the oblique, often-backwards way of Melchor’s fiction, it is heralded by the opening of a gate. Though Paradais may lack quite the same emotional clout as Hurricane Season, here too the lasting effect is in the ending: only in the sudden calm that follows the storm can we see what linguistic magic has been worked, and make sense of all we have read. Paradais leaves its readers breathless, wide-eyed, yet with a startling sense of newfound clarity: a literary tour de force from a writer of truly formidable talent.
Paradais is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 23rd March 2022