150 years ago, Victor Hugo wrote a fiery defense of the poor in the novel “Les Misérables”. He found goodness in the wretched among us. In “Paradais”, Fernanda Melchor lets misery emerge in all its horror. She writes about how poverty and lack of freedom make a young boy make disastrous choices. The story from Mexico does not have a happy ending. Laying leads from the start The story revolves around sixteen-year-old Polo. It is his gaze that we follow. This is how the first sentence reads: When someone says they did nothing but follow orders, there is reason to be suspicious. It is a classic cleansing technique. But what has Polo been ordered to do? Did he have the option of refusing? Fernanda Melchor keeps the excitement going. However, it will not be long before we realize the ironic meaning of the title of the book. Dangerous desire Polo works as a gardener and cleaning boy behind the locked gates of “Paradais”, a posh residential complex reserved for the wealthy. Polo himself has no funds. He slaves for lousy wages every day of the week. After he dropped out of school, his options are limited. He cleans the swimming pool that the residents cool off in. The pool is not for him; he is banished to the muddy river behind the dilapidated, haunted colonial mansion by the thicket. Then he becomes drinking buddies with the well-born and spoiled Franco Andrade, a blond and lonely boy who lives in this “paradise”. Franco makes sure that Polo gets a daily high, while he fills his ears with his lust for his neighbor’s wife, Senora Marián. The desire becomes an obsession: Franco’s perpetual masturbation is elaborately and nauseatingly described – and he decides that he must have the senora, if it has to be forced. For a long time, Polo thinks it’s a prank from a hot and naive teenager. But that’s before Fleskeberget brings a gun… Provocative author 40-year-old Fernanda Melchor lives in Berlin, but gets her drug from her native Mexico. She often portrays people who are subjected to – or voluntarily seek out – violence and humiliation. RECOGNIZED: Mexican Fernanda Melchor has won the German International Literature Award and been shortlisted for The International Booker Prize. Photo: ZOE NOBLE / NYT/NTB The language is unpolished, oral. In long sentences almost without periods, the author drags us through life’s lies, hatred and curses. Polo’s inner voice buzzes and goes, even though this is a third-person narrative. Rage and self-defense intertwine, before everything ends in an ugly bang. I get an unpleasant claustrophobic feeling; this is intended as an acknowledgment of the author’s project. The degradation of the poor “Paradais” becomes a suggestive story about a desire that cannot be curbed. But beneath the driving plot lies a story about the skewed distribution of material goods in modern-day Mexico. Polo has no options. His cousin is forced to commit both robbery and murder for a local drug gang. The grandfather, who suggested to Polo that the two of them should build a small boat so that Polo could make a living as a fisherman, is dead, and his tools are scattered to all winds. Polo has buoyancy, but circumstances hold him down. Fernanda Melchor shows the sparks that can start a fire when class differences become as huge as here. At the same time, she draws out two boys from each of their backgrounds, who are both equally desperate and doomed. Gives the miserable a face Christian Rugstad has brought up an ingenious vocabulary in his Norwegian translation. Only the descriptions of Franco, such as the pork mountain, the fat man, the humpback whale, the boy whale and the puffin cuckoo, show great ingenuity. When I struggle to sympathize with Polo, it may of course be because he is not an entirely likable guy. It makes the portrait all the more effective. At the same time, he will be exposed to too many destructive social mechanisms. In such a perspective, Polo becomes more like a representative of a universal and intangible tragedy. I rarely read books from Mexico. The poverty, racism and violence depicted in this book evoke both disgust, anger and a sad sense of hopelessness. Having said that: “Paradise” gives me an almost physical access to the misery I already knew about through the news. That is a strength of good literature: It brings the big world closer. WATCH ON news TV: The drug cartels hold Mexico in an iron grip. In the world’s largest drug industry, brutal methods are used in the pursuit of power and money. Watch the documentary “The drug war in Mexico” from 2018.
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“Paradise” by Fernanda Melchor – Reviews and recommendations
