Fernanda Melchor’s novel “Paradais” – Culture

For polo, paradise is hell. He works in the “Paradais”, a closed residential complex in Mexico for the rich and beautiful. Because such a gated community is a very earthly affair, someone has to clean up the dirt left by the pool parties and the pets and the spoiled brood of the residents. That’s polo’s job. If he had finished school, if his mother hadn’t taken in his cousin, there might be some way out of his life for Polo – but at the point where Fernanda Melchor begins her novel “Paradais”, everything is over for Polo.

He thinks the fat man is to blame for everything. But not entirely true. Part of the guilt lies in the circumstances, and part of it lies entirely in Polo itself. Who is guilty and knows their responsibility? What Fernanda Melchor works out of Polo, from whose point of view “Paradais” is told, is a very everyday mechanism of shifting guilt, just not in the case of an everyday deed.

Fernanda Melchor, who won the Anna Seghers Prize in 2019 for her previous novel “Season of Cyclones” and the International Literature Prize from the House of Cultures, originally studied journalism and comes from the area she describes; Really looking into the head, watching how powerlessness and anger and hopelessness condense into aggression against women, you can only do that in fiction. She made that up, sure – but the background is a country where extreme inequality actually goes hand in hand with terrifying murder statistics.

Rich and poor only meet in Melchors Mexico where one serves the other

Polo’s life takes place at the interface where social responsibility is palpable – and yet it is very clear that he rejects any personal responsibility. Polo is aggressive, misogynous, full of hatred, and utterly incapable of seeing anything but a victim in oneself. As the center of the action, he’s kind of a creep – and that’s why it’s so exciting to follow your thoughts.

The fat man is the grandson of rich people from the residential complex, a pimply young man named Franco, who in turn is an outcast in his community – his father parked him with his grandparents because the spoiled child was thrown out of school. Nobody wants to have anything to do with Franco, but because he can always get cheap booze from the money he steals from his grandparents, Polo spends his evenings with him on the riverside instead of going home to his village. He can’t stand Franco, but he still prefers to have to endure Franco’s drunken drivel than to go home to where his mother beats him with her slippers and his pregnant cousin occupies his bed.

With a tremendous furore, Fernanda Melchor lets the thoughts of this boy rush past in her third novel, who forfeited his life before he could do anything with it – a misogynistic, violent torrent of words. In the village where Polo comes from, everyone is either poor or criminal. Somewhere off, the city, Veracruz, is obviously just a stone’s throw away. But for polo it is inaccessible. There is no other job for him. Such are the conditions in the Mexico that Fernanda Melchor describes, a ditch separates rich and poor, and their worlds only touch where one serves the other.

The protagonist is unable to even name happiness, beauty or affection

It is the chronicle of an announced loss of control – Polo has nothing else to lose, he only has power over his own behavior towards others. He’s even tried to hire the Mexican drug mafia through his cousin, he’s so desperate. Nobody feels sorry for polo or shows a minimum of respect for polo, and so they don’t even know what it is.

The brutalization of its protagonist is already expressed in his language, full of strong expressions, unable to even name happiness or beauty or affection. What Melchor makes him think is a kind of end credits – all the details that still occur to him, how it comes to the brutal bloody deed that culminates in her novel. You can’t really explain what’s going on in someone who engages in an orgy of violence. But if you try, then only completely from your perspective.