In the place of a detective’s discerning narrative perspective, Melchor gives us Faulknerian free indirect speech: a roving narratorial eye, indifferent to guilt and endowed with strange poetic affinities. Yet neither Hurricane Season nor Paradais are conventional mysteries. Opening with the fact of a crime is a common trope for noir novels. Her 2017 novel Temporada de huracanes ( Hurricane Season, translated into English in 2020), also set in the verdant decay of coastal Veracruz, opens with the discovery of the corpse of a “witch” in the cane fields. She seems to be fond of the in medias res setup. Born in Veracruz in 1982 and initially trained as a journalist, Melchor is now one of Mexico’s most lauded authors. It then takes two steps back, winding its way to a foregone conclusion that is nevertheless shocking - if not as a function of the plot per se, then as a byproduct of Melchor’s vivid, pitiless style. The novel starts with Polo’s nervous excuses that “t was all because of Franco Andrade,” and thus the vague assurance that something terrible has already occurred. Cracks appear in the walls of Paradise when Polo and Franco strike up a friendship (of sorts), brought together by shared misogyny, alcoholic escapism, and Polo’s resentful albeit consistent willingness to be quiet while Franco plies him with booze and rants about his insane sexual obsession with the neighbor’s wife, Señora Marián. Theirs is a world of vicious class segregation: the wealthy reside in a carefully manicured páradais while their gardeners live on the other side of a gangrenous waterway in crumbling settlements run by gangs. Franco, son of a powerful lawyer and resident of the complex, is Polo’s lighter-skinned, misanthropic peer.
Leopoldo García Chaparro, “Polo,” is a 16-year-old gardener at Paradise, a luxury housing complex whose anglicized name he cannot pronounce, hence the title. SET ON MEXICO’S Gulf Coast in tropical Veracruz, careening towards the realization of a deranged and puerile scheme, Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is the inevitable unfolding of something we already know.
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