★ 2023-03-14
A collection of narratives focusing on the dark side of Veracruz.
“To live in a city is to live among stories,” Mexican author Melchor writes in her latest book to be translated into English. But what does she mean by stories? The accounts in the collection—“relatos,” she calls them, or “tales”—are based on real events, she writes, but “have no journalistic claims because they don’t include accurate dates, hard facts or car registration plates…but nor can they be called realist fiction.” Whatever they’re called, they’re extraordinary, each one a portrait of life in Veracruz in the past decades. In “Queen, Slave, Woman,” Melchor tells the story of Evangelina Tejera Bosada, a former queen of Veracruz’s annual Carnival who bludgeoned her sons to death, dismembered them, and placed the remains in a pot on her balcony. Melchor’s observations about the case are fascinating; she writes about the dissonance between Tejera Bosada’s former image as a beloved Carnival queen and her image after the slayings as a coldblooded killer: “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.” In “The House on El Estero,” Melchor recounts a story told to her by a former partner who visited a supposedly haunted house years before and claims to have come face to face with the devil. Her ex’s story itself is indeed terrifying, but Melchor turns it into a fascinating reflection on the nature of narrative itself. The collection closes with “Veracruz With a Zee for Zeta,” a wrenching story, told in the second person, about the experience of a person who witnesses violence connected to the Los Zetas cartel. The last two paragraphs are a gut punch, some of the most wrenching prose to come around in years. 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 result is an absorbing, compassionately rendered portrait of a place, its people and its ills. The stories are punctuated by brief but telling allusions to the material conditions that sustain the moral degradation she describes: police corruption, social security cuts, prison overcrowding, unscrupulous building contractors. Melchor’s macabre aesthetic has shades of gothic horror, but she is a Dickensian at heart.’
— Houman Barekat, Sunday Times
‘Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’
― Julian Lucas, New York Times
‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage and has the skill to pull it off.’
― Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream
‘Time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.’
— Chris Power, Guardian
‘Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miami is, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’
— Pippa Bailey, New Statesman
‘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.’
— Juan Gabriel Vázquez, New Yorker
‘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.’
— William T. Vollmann, New York Times
‘Melchor isn’t inventing anything in broad strokes…She’s not playing with facts so much as how facts are delivered — oral history, first person, second person, ghost story, legend. A lesser journalist massages details to more perfectly fit a narrative. Melchor is doing something more like the opposite: playing with form to expose the lies, hypocrisies, hatreds and oversights that soften or avoid the reality of human evil. Melchor isn’t claiming to know the whole story. But what she means to say is that we should think twice before we do as well.’
— Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times
‘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.’
—Kirkus starred review
‘Melchor resists the seductive burden of explaining the realities (or exaggerations) of such non-European regions in blistering, true-crime detail. Though based on real events, these relatos are decidedly not journalistic, and not even realist. Melchor’s prose blooms under that strange light.’
— Lisa Yin Zhang, Frieze
‘Translator Sophie Hughes has performed another heroic feat in rendering Melchor’s winding sentences into breathtakingly stylish English. These stories, packed with dismembered limbs and immolation, are not for the faint-hearted, but Melchor’s writing offers a special, twisted kind of beauty.’
— Michael Delgado, i News
‘In finding a narrative for those who are rarely given literary or any other kind of airtime, and in writing in a vernacular that acknowledges the cruelty that lurks in the language of neutral observation, Melchor writes a new kind of folklore that allows us to hear the ferocious reality of contemporary violence.’
— Jess Cotton, Jacobin
‘Seamlessly translated by Sophie Hughes from the initial Spanish, This Is Not Miami is a compelling read. However, be warned; these tales may well devour your dreaming.’
— Annie Hayter, Big Issue
‘In a country where corruption runs rampant, where the official story from the police or the government is tainted, inadequate, or missing altogether, This Is Not Miami functions as a counternarrative: Melchor presents a corrective simply by getting close to her subjects and telling their stories one by one, often in their own voices.…This Is Not Miami makes clear just how grounded the heightened drama of Hurricane Season and Paradais is. The connections between Melchor’s fiction and nonfiction go beyond the subject matter—poverty and superstition, misogyny and sexual violence—and include how a story can be corrupted as it passes from person to person.’
— Laura Adamczyk, The Nation
