Paradais

‘When I was finishing writing Hurricane Season, I found out that the residents of a real town in Veracruz called La Matosa (from which I took the name to create the fictional setting of my novel) were evicted from their lands so that a luxury gated community with a golf course could be built in their place. In Hurricane Season I had written, among other things, about misogynistic violence in marginalised areas, and this time around I wanted to explore the fact that violence is not something that’s exclusively tied to misery or poverty, but something that could also be born in the heart of ‘paradise’, this luxury compound for privileged people.’

Read the full interview here.

‘In Paradais Fernanda Melchor draws us into the brutish, profane world of two unlikely, hapless teenagers, Polo and Franco, in the gated community where they plot a crime that can only go horribly wrong. Sophies Hughes’ endlessly inventive translation breathtakingly captures the book’s caustic humour and exhilarating pace.’

Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

‘Paradais is both more compact and more cogent [than Hurricane Season]. Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence […] From its first sentence, in fact, Paradais feels rhythmically propelled towards a violent climax. Full stops occur rarely enough to seem meaningful, Melchor using long lines of unbroken narrative to reel in her terrible ending.’

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, New Yorker

‘With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the [Paradais and Hurricane Season] navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex. And they establish Melchor, who was born in 1982, as the latest of Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable […] Paradais is a portrait of an ailing society inured to its own cruelty, and employs long paragraphs and supple sentences, always alive to the rhythms of speech. But the new novel departs from the previous one in important ways: it is more contained, less daring, less ambitious; it is, in a peculiar way, more reader-friendly.’

Chris Power, The Guardian

‘Paradais has a tighter focus than Hurricane Season (both are superbly translated into English by Sophie Hughes). Its sentences are less breathless and serpentine, but its subject matter is equally challenging.’

Barry Pierce, Irish Times

‘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.’

Michael Delgado, inews

‘A much slimmer, tauter book, but occupies a similar world [as Hurricane Season]. Here, though, the climax – another brutal act – happens not at the start but at the end, and we know from the opening pages who does it and why […]Paradais has the intensity of a short story, and it might seem like the escalation of events is too extreme to be truly believable. But Melchor’s prose, in Sophie Hughes’s virtuosic translation, is so potent that the story’s pace never feels outlandish.’