In Fernanda Melchor's crime-inspired novels, male fear and desire are two sides of the same coin. maxpearl profiled the author who's reached the top of Mexico's literary scene with harrowing but compassionate depictions of true-crime stories
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This is one of the most shocking sequences in Fernanda Melchor’s latest novel, Paradais. It’s also partly true. Melchor, who grew up in Veracruz, says she heard the story from a friend, who heard it from a taxi driver — which is typical for this friend, whom Melchor calls “the taxi psychologist.” The main difference between reality and Melchor’s version is that in Paradais, the taxi driver doesn’t live to tell the tale. “I’m a story collector,” she tells me.
Melchor has a ventriloquist’s flair for dialogue that makes her characters crackle and pop. She writes in a close third person, in paragraph-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs, in a voice that shifts subtly to match the character she’s trained on at any given moment. As a result, it feels like you’re simultaneously inside and outside a character’s head, experiencing in high definition the pathos that drives each decision and the chain reaction set off as a result.
At the time, she imagined herself as a writer of crónica, a Latin American nonfiction genre that draws on the interpretative storytelling of literature, theater, and memoir. She’d always loved chisme, the kind of gossip that gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in the proverbial town square.
Her next book, Hurricane Season, was inspired by a story from the nota roja, Mexico’s shameless crime tabloids. The news story was about a man who murdered someone he believed was a witch; he was convinced the witch had cast a spell on his wife. “That detail for me was like, Whoa!” she says. “The story wasn’t just the putrefied corpse with its throat slit—that’s the least interesting part — but the love triangle behind it.
Having exploded on the scene with a book in which violence and poverty are linked, Melchor wanted to write about how evil transcends class. That’s how she arrived at Paradais, an upstairs-downstairs novel told from the perspective of two teenagers, whom Melchor jokingly referred to as “tropical Beavis and Butt-head”: Franco, an emotionally stunted porn addict who lives in the upscale housing development, and Polo, a high-school dropout who works there.
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