This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sopie Hughes
A Book Review...
During Women in Translation Month, I read This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish from Sophie Hughes. Sophie Hughes is one of my favorite translators and I became an instant fan of Melchor after reading Paradais in 2022.
My quick take on Paradais from my Goodreads.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4755917325
This book is dark and grim and violent. The two main characters Polo and Franco are both major trainwrecks in different ways. Polo wants nothing more than to get away from his current life and family. He carries such disdain for his mother and many of the women in his life, so much so that he avoids them all at any cost. He's also entangled in very disturbing sexual activity. Franco made my skin crawl. He is crude, unbecoming in his presence, violent, and seems to be a sexual deviant. He's obsessed with this woman and will do anything to be with her. Polo gets wrapped up in one of Franco's schemes and things turn quickly and could very well change the outcome of Polo's life.
This story moves fast--almost shockingly so. The language is also very rough in tone like it's hanging on the edge of a cliff and not afraid to fall. Reading this felt like being cut by razor blades. I really appreciate what this author has done with this book. I'm definitely going to pick up Hurricane Season at some point.
This Is Not Miami is a short story collection and it is important to note and understand that the lives of real people, real circumstances, and real horrific situations live and breathe in these stories.
From the Author’s Note
I do not write about tears, armed men, or wounded children where they never actually existed. At the heart of these texts is not the incidents themselves, but the impact they had on their witnesses. The stories are based on events that really happened (a group of stowaways stranded at Veracruz’s port; a ritual exorcism), but in their subjectiveness they go beyond straightforward testimony, homing in on the transformative experiences of their protagonists.
The Author’s Note explains so much. It should not be skipped over and neither should this short story collection. These stories are haunting, to say the least, and memorable.
In one story a witness to a shooting finds the body of a young girl mutilated, wearing nothing but a cardboard sign with a message from her killers. And another where a beauty queen murders and dismembers her children.
She hadn’t killed them, she vehemently maintained. The poor things had starved to death and she’d merely tried to dispose of the bodies: first on a makeshift paper pyre in the living room, and then, when that tactic failed, by cutting off their legs with a kitchen knife to make them fit inside a big Oaxacan-style plant pot, given to her by her mother months earlier.
Melchor is a favorite author of mine. Her writing is fierce and I am always gripped by her words.
Have you read anything from Fernanda Melchor?