In her crime-inspired novels, male fear and desire are two sides of the same coin.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Lee la noticia en espanol aqui.
The scene openson a kid named Milton.
But first, they need a car.
This is one of the most shocking sequences in Fernanda Melchors latest novel,Paradais.Its also partly true.
(He gets in the cab, asks a question, and the driver starts going off.)
Im a story collector, she tells me.
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.
Writing in Spanish, she avoids the sensational, even when depicting violence in extreme detail.
She shows instead how ordinary these episodes have become and that makes them even scarier.
But theres nothing distinctly Mexican about a gated community.
Its a universal feature of any place with a distended wealth gap.
Melchor has a ventriloquists flair for dialogue that makes her characters crackle and pop.
(This carries through in English as well, thanks to translator Sophie Hughes.)
You read her, and it feels like youre in a thunder-and-lightning storm, says Goldman.
You know how people say, That person has talent to burn?
Well, its like she just burns and burns and burns and never runs out.
It all started with an essay contest.
In Mexico, journalism is something you only learn by doing it, she says.
I wanted to get out there.
Melchor thought the story was terrifying, fascinating, and kind of beautiful.
On the one hand, only the state is supposed to prosecute people.
Melchor wanted to report it out, Truman Capote style.
Her story won second place in the contest.
To me, it seems ridiculous.
What you have to do is use your subjectivity and take advantage of it.
She had always written fiction, even before she started reporting.
Soon she decided to return to it: In 2013 she published her first novel,Falsa Liebre.
That detail for me was like,Whoa!
In Spanish, Melchors sentences are packed with regionalisms.
Working backward from the books climactic murder, Melchor reveals the mind-warping effects of living in a toxic miasma.
To write it, Melchor reproduced the language of machismo shes been hearing her whole life.
When I found out they were going to translateHurricane Seasonto English, I thought,Uh oh.
I feel quite adamant that there is no poverty porn in this book, Hughes says ofHurricane Season.
To me, its an act of generosity.
Writing this way takes its toll.
After Melchor finished that novel, she started going to therapy.
It was like swatting a hornets nest, she says.
Whereas Pacheco only alludes to carnal desire, Melchor makes it her books engine.
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.
This had once been her way of finding acceptance and to escape the stigma of being a tomboy.
I had to confront my own discourse.
Its a primitive fear, atavistic even, toward women and their reproductive capacity, she says.
Its like that dumb joke: How can you trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesnt die?
Shes already thinking about the kind of story she might tell next time.
I want to write a tragedy that doesnt necessarily resolve as a tragedy.
Maybe, she says, something a little more hopeful.
Hair and makeup by Felix Stoer for Basics Berlin.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
