This is Not Miami

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This year’s International Booker Prize boasts perhaps the most diverse shortlist in its history: its six authors span four continents and two of the books were written in languages that have never been in contention for the prize before. One is Boulder, a compelling Catalan novella that emerged in 2020 and was published in English in August of last year, by the Barcelona-born poet Eva Baltasar, which I wouldn’t bet against to take home the prize. When the story opens, our unnamed narrator is about to board a merchant ship off the coast of Chile. Working as a chef on the voyage, she meets an Icelandic woman, Samsa, and falls in love.

This Is Not Miami was Melchor’s first book, published in 2013 (and again in 2018) as Aquí no es Miami, but it is her third work translated into English. In the decade between the Spanish and English publications, Melchor has soared to national and international acclaim; her novel Hurricane Season was published in English in 2020 and short-listed for the International Booker Prize, while Paradais was published in English in 2022 and long-listed for the International Booker.In the early nineties, Playa del Muerto, or Dead Man’s Beach, was little more than a strip of greyish sand located in the city of Boca del Río, a city in the municipality of the same name, just south of Veracruz. Its scorching dunes were covered in thorny shrubs, which were littered with rotten branches and plastic bottles that the river dragged down from the mountains when the waters were high. It wasn’t a busy or particularly pretty beach (if any of the beaches in this part of the Gulf of Mexico can said to be truly pretty) and there were times – especially during high tide or storms – when the sand would disappear entirely and not even the breakwaters could prevent the waves from crashing onto the highway connecting the two cities.

opposing yet complementary archetypes, masks that dehumanize flesh and blood women and become blank screens on which to project the desires, fears, and anxieties of a society that professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist, and misogynist.fernanda melchor's this is not miami (aquí no es miami) features a dozen crónicas and relatos ("reality doesn't have a will of its own; it doesn't have any predetermined meaning at all, which means that newspaper stories as much as novels are always, to a degree, 'fictional,' in as far as they are artificial constructs, not to be confused with life itself.") — each set in and near veracruz, where the unflinching mexican author was born. Arquetipos opuestos pero complementarios, máscaras que deshumanizan a mujeres de carne y hueso, y que funcionan como pantallas en donde se proyectan los deseos, los temores y las ansiedades de una sociedad que se pretende un enclave de sensualismo tropical pero que en el fondo es profundamente conservadora, clasista y misógina. Melchor is up-front about her intentions. In an introductory author’s note, she says her goal is “to tell stories in what I regard as the most honest way possible: by accepting language’s inherent obliqueness and using it to the story’s advantage.” El estilo de esta autora es muy personal, una especie de crónica periodística seminovelada, que con un lenguaje preciso y austero nos va transmitiendo unos hechos terribles, que no necesitan demasiada elaboración ni comentario.An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Fernanda Melchor's third publication in English (and third with the excellent Fitzacarraldo Editions) is something of a departure from the preceding books - Hurricane Season and Paradais) in that it is a collection of reportage and narrative non-fiction pieces dating to around 2011, as opposed to fiction. However there is no doubt that it has thematic similarities with her previous books in that it focuses on the darker, more troubling side of humanity and society.

The Zetas also maintained control of Veracruz through high-level corruption. Herrera, the state governor from 2004 to 2010, worked with the criminal organization, enriching himself and putting local police forces at the disposal of the Zetas. His successor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, embezzled funds on a truly massive scale. These governors made Veracruz the most dangerous state in the country for journalists. In 2016, the year that Duarte left office, the largest mass grave in Mexico was discovered in Veracruz. It contained over 300 skulls. Melchor’s Paradais features a criminal group based on the Zetas, but the group is referred to simply as them. No one dares speak their name; everyone knows what that hushed term refers to. Here again are the lies and evasions of grown-ups, but in the novel, there is no Melchor figure to investigate and make sense of the dark shadow cast by them. 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.” My thanks to @fitzcarraldoeditions and @netgalley for my copy of this book – look out for it when it’s published on 10th May. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive.’ New York TimesIn the 1970s, new feminist versions of folklore and fairy tale began to appear in which the silenced female figures at their heart could be seen and reclaimed. These retellings were driven by a conviction that the creativity of these tales could be rescued from their violence. But Melchor is not interested in this. Instead, she frames folklore and fairy tale within contemporary scenes of violence to show the role they continue to play in mediating what is most unbearable. Initially, the refugees appear as nine spectral figures who emerge out of the water “soaked to the bone, with their arms and legs covered in welts that looked like whip marks,” and they remain a spectral presence in the tale, haunting what should have been an “uneventful” night shift at work. The port workers’ gesture of solidarity to the stowaways — to help them pass safely through the city — is challenged by one of the crewmembers, who is on a retributive mission to New York to avenge the killers of his own family, and whose murderous impulse makes him a liability to all. Searing yet humane, filled with violence and brutality, fear and unquenchable hope that life could be different, Melchor has pulled together a series of relatos ('tales', 'accounts') that build up to a portrait of Veracruz and its inhabitants. But with Melchor as a character, exploring and archiving Veracruz, we do get a clearer picture. While this Veracruz is similarly bleak to the one we see in her other works, it is also Veracruz positioned within a specific context. We follow along as Melchor traces changes during a grim period for the city and state: the governorship of Fidel Herrera Beltrán and the takeover of the state by Los Zetas. But 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.