This is Not Miami

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If you can handle the darkness, then get your hands on this as soon as you can. An easy recommendation from me. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’ She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’ Few places reverberate so noisily with the ghosts of their history as the English seaside resort,” writes Madeleine Bunting. The country’s coastline is spattered with towns – Felixstowe, Scarborough, Weston-super-Mare, New Brighton – that were once elegant but now include areas of severe deprivation. Cada cuento es como una pieza de un puzzle, sin demasiado sentido por sí misma, pero cuando las juntas todas tienes un retrato auténtico de la ciudad de Veracruz y de toda la violencia que acompaña al narcotráfico y que afecta a las vidas diarias de la gente, aunque se hayan acostumbrado a este estado de cosas.

These learned ways of speaking pervade This Is Not Miami. The final relato is entitled “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” a variant on a familiar formulation for talking about areas under the dominion of the Zetas (zeta is the Spanish word for the letter z). Óscar Martínez’s 2016 book A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, for example, contains a chapter called “Guatemala Is Spelled with a Z.” In addition to bravely presenting dark truths, Melchor writes from a good heart…Melchor makes her point (not without sorrow and gruesome humor), then gets out of the way, so that her subjects can speak.’ PDF / EPUB File Name: This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.pdf, This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.epub In “ This Is Not Miami,” her new book of not-quite-nonfiction, Fernanda Melchor tells the true story of a lynching in her home of Veracruz, a state on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In 1996, a man named Rodolfo Soler stood accused of rape and murder, and Melchor relates the townspeople’s vengeance — torturing him and burning him alive — in prose as cool as the events were grotesque. “Once he’d fallen to the floor they cut off his left foot with a machete to see if he was still alive,” she writes, “and since he continued groaning, they poured another can of fuel over him.”Fernanda Melchor doesn’t do reportage as many know it. What she writes are ‘relatos’, stories based on real incidents that people told the author, personal testimonies and stories based on long interviews. Differently from Svetlana Alexievich (who doesn’t add her own commentary), Melchor crafts tales, some sounding like essays, some others like literary fiction. Horrific, eerie, gut-wrenching, sometimes even supernatural. Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today. Absolutely stunning.’

The revelation in this relato is not about Veracruz but about Melchor. She is fascinated by the story and captivated by the storyteller. But they “lived in different worlds”—she the investigator and archivist, and he a member of the culture that dismisses the archive. She hints at a difficult incompatibility, between herself the outsider and the people and world that fascinate her. From a bestselling migration memoir to an acclaimed novel of suburbia, political poetry and essays and on and on, Salvadoran writers are having a big moment.

Advance Praise

The fable-like narrative chops between different time periods, a plethora of characters and references to Korean folklore. It is a shame that it took until January of this year to get an English translation, because Whale is an enchanting epic that fully deserves its place on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv El horror está presente, un horror real, que se siente, incluso, en el caso de una de las crónicas, “La casa del estero”, como un soberbio cruce entre el relato de terror sobrenatural y la crónica periodística. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops The tales, which all spiral out from real events, start off on relatively innocent footing. In one, Melchor’s nine-year-old self mistakes Colombian cocaine planes in the Veracruz night sky for UFOs — a modern kind of fairy tale. Swiftly, This Is Not Miami’s stories become more violent. “The Devil’s House,” a story told by a man who would become Melchor’s lover, concerns supernatural possession; another tale recounts Mel Gibson’s displacement of a prison population for the shooting of his 2012 film Get the Gringo. However, this is still classic Melchor, it's dark, it's violent. The The Exorcist and Mel Gibson both make an appearance. There is a forsaken ruin, the ominously named, Casa del Diablo. A beauty queen turned murderess is found with bodies in plant pots. This is a bewitching tour of the darkest corners of Veracruz, exposing the violence and corruption in ways that feel fresh and slightly risky both creatively and also probably literally.

As in that play, the novel, which was published in English in January by the ever-reliable Fitzcarraldo, depicts a gathering gone wrong, with the arrival of menacing strangers throwing into chaos a day of celebration. Teased out in unflinching, darkly comic prose, The Birthday Party is a harrowing masterpiece. WhaleBut seriously, Melchor is a writer of formidable talent. To my knowledge she currently has three books translated into English, this being the third. All of them are outstanding. Estas ceremonias eran - y son aún - tan populares entre los veracruzanos que incluso la Iglesia católica ha empezado a ofertar regularmente misas de sanación y liberación...