A review by dylan2219
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Fernanda Melchor’s follow up to Hurricane Season is (nearly) as grim and unrelenting as that book; she continues her downward spiral into examining misogyny, class, and violence in Mexico with her perfect blend of ramblingly confessional, yet pathologically precise  intensity. Like that book, Paradais is a structural marvel of shifting time and perspective, carried by the corrosive voice of its characters, rotting away from too much time spent in a sick and dying world. It - too - is a kind of late capitalist, post colonial Gothic novel. There is a haunted mansion, there are ghosts and witches, the bruising weight of the past, obsession, addiction, murder, rape, revenge. The decision to set the book in its titular gated community, with a fetid, swamp-like pool that reminded me of Lucrecia Martel’s film La Cienaga, is the book’s unique counterpoint to its predecessor yet is sadly rather unexplored. The book frankly needs more; and it suffers in comparison to its predecessors holistic mosaic of social ills by instead lightly toying around with a few similar ones primarily through the prism of two rather underdeveloped characters. The novel’s main driving force, while amazingly presented at the conclusion, also wraps up a little too neatly and feels unearned. And, in some ways, the desire to shock and bludgeon with the most heinous language and images possible feels a little tackier this time round. That being said, no one is writing novels with such ingenious structure and pacing, with such an assured voice, and with such venomous anger at injustice. The question now is how long this can be sustained before the shock feels hollow.