This is Not Miami

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I kinda feel if you are a Melchor fan then this collection of tales or accounts ( relatos in Spanish ) is essential reading. These pieces are set in and around Veracruz, Mexico and they provide a little more social context to Melchor's outstanding novels Hurricane Season and Paradais without quite putting you through the emotional wringer that those books do. Lights in the Sky,” the first relato in the volume, encapsulates this narrative approach. On a trip to Dead Man’s Beach in Veracruz, the nine-year-old Melchor sees strange lights moving fast across the night sky. She interprets these as UFOs, getting caught up in a burst of public fascination with extraterrestrials. The mystery is casually punctured when a family friend observes that the lights are from narco planes. These clandestine flights traffic cocaine into Veracruz, seemingly under the supervision of the Federal Judicial Police. 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.’ The tales, which all spiral out from real events, start off on relatively innocent footing. In one, Melchor’s nine-year-old self mistakes Colombian cocaine planes in the Veracruz night sky for UFOs — a modern kind of fairy tale. Swiftly, This Is Not Miami’s stories become more violent. “The Devil’s House,” a story told by a man who would become Melchor’s lover, concerns supernatural possession; another tale recounts Mel Gibson’s displacement of a prison population for the shooting of his 2012 film Get the Gringo.

Los relatos suceden en Veracruz, muestran la presencia del narco, cómo ha afectado a la ciudadanía, a las prácticas culturales. Una ciudad, un puerto, la ignominia, la injusticia y un par de ojos bien abiertos que saben transformar lo escuchado, lo leído, lo vivido, en unas historias brutales. 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.” In 2007, a decade after her definitive sentence, Bosada’s case resurfaced as it was linked to that of Oscar Sentíes Alfonsín, a character feared by crime journalists in the early 2000s. Alfonsín, who became romantically entangled in prison with Bosada, pushed, through connections with Los Zetas, who were by then running the Veracruz carceral system, for her early release. A year later, Alfonsín was killed in the cell in which he had been put for attempting to organize another revolt. Rather than portraying perpetrators of mass violence as inhuman, Melchor forces us to see the desperation and perverse desires out of which their actions emerge. Melchor does not get to the bottom of every mystery; her skepticism cannot debunk every tale. “The House on El Estero” is a horror story about an inexplicable exorcism. It is framed by Melchor’s partner—her future partner at the time of telling, her ex at the time of writing—relating the story and Melchor interjecting with questions and doubts. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’One summer, nine teenage girls arrive at an isolated Alpine village to train as maids at the Hotel Olympic, an eerie building which “looked like it was in miniature, like a doll’s house”. Throughout the early part of the novel, “no guests arrived”, but when visitors finally come, one of the girls goes missing and terror ensues. Strega, published in Sweden in 2020 and here in November last year, has all the hallmarks of a classic horror story – but in its preoccupations with male violence and female collectivity it feels thrillingly modern. Upcoming books to look out for The Wolf Hunt It's hard to understand where this refusal to succumb to despair comes from: these stories depict prison life, poverty, casual cruelties where women kill and mutilate their children, where a rapist is lynched by the family of his victim, a terrifying story of a haunted house - and yet somewhere there is a resistance to simply folding and giving up under the weight of so much misery and desolation. Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as ‘one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices’ ( Guardian ). She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season , which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her most recent novel, Paradais , was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This Is Not Miami is a collection of narrative non-fiction pieces. Melchor’s books are published in thirty-four territories. She lives in Mexico. The English title of Laurent Mauvignier’s 2020 novel, The Birthday Party, is surely a conscious reference to Harold Pinter’s 1957 play of the same name, for Mauvignier’s tale is distinctly Pinteresque in its nightmarish plot.

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.’ The collection of relatos can certainly be read as a precursor to the novels. Familiar tropes from the novels appear in some form across the relatos: tales of vindictive spirits, youth flirting with catastrophe, violent killers who must not be named. This is the same Veracruz we encounter in Hurricane Season and Paradais, but we see it from a different perspective. Hurricane Season ends with the idea that the grave is the only way out of the dark times in Veracruz. This Is Not Miami also ends on a note of despair, but for a particularly bad time in Veracruz that could one day pass. And it might actually be possible to see out and survive the horror, to find its limits and look beyond them. PDF / EPUB File Name: This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.pdf, This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.epub

This is Not Miami

After learning the truth behind her belief in extraterrestrials, Melchor says of that belief and those stories: “They were just lies, the inventions of grown-ups.” It is a classic coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence line. But in This Is Not Miami, the lies take a specific form. No particular grown-ups have deceived her—her father found the fascination with UFOs ridiculous—but the world appears as one big lie or cover-up. The incident involving the ambush of federal police was a rare case of the truth evading government censors. Melchor’s latest book to be translated into English by Sophie Hughes, This Is Not Miami, the imaginative forerunner of her two previous novels, is a series of accounts or essays in the style of crónicas, as they are known in Mexico. These are stories that cross reportage and narrative nonfiction, riding roughshod over the line between fact and fiction. In this collection Fernanda Melchor does for Veracruz what David Simon does for Baltimore. Through personal stories she manages to paint a broad picture of crime, addiction, violence, ineffective government and prison life in the city.

Me ha encantado 'La casa del Estero', que comienza como un relato de género sobre una casa encantada y nos introduce en el mundo de los curanderos y el exorcismo, lo cual nos hace asomarnos a las creencias primigenias de la ciudad. 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. Last year Andrey Kurkov, a Russian-born author who moved to Kyiv when he was two and has since become one of Ukraine’s most celebrated writers, wrote Diary of an Invasion, a journal from the early months of the war. It is worth reading alongside his novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, which was published in Russian a decade ago and translated in April, and showcases Kurkov’s trademark style of sharp satire and gallows humour. From a bestselling migration memoir to an acclaimed novel of suburbia, political poetry and essays and on and on, Salvadoran writers are having a big moment. 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.’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. 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.' 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. For a few years, the impact of the Zetas on Veracruz, and on Mexico itself, was so profound that they changed the vernacular, the way people spoke. A culture of joyful conversing and barroom braggadocio learned silence and circumspection.