This is Not Miami

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This vignette, from Fernanda Melchor’s newly translated collection of stories This Is Not Miami, will seem familiar to readers of the author’s novels. Casual brutality, disregard for the dead, and violent contempt for women feature prominently across her work. But this vignette is different. For one, there is no ambiguity around who is responsible for the violence. For another, the woman who finds the memorial in this story could be Melchor herself. Fernanda Melchor, author extraordinaire, goes literary journalism: This collection assembles thirteen non-fiction texts, mostly written between 2002 and 2011, that paint a vivid picture of Melchor's hometown of Veracruz, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. In her foreword, she ponders the relation between fiction and non-fiction, especially regarding framing and perspectives, and what terms, in English and Spanish, try to encompass different approaches to the circumstance that all writing is ultimately subjective, that objectivity is a goal one might strife for, but that it is unattainable due to our imperfect human nature (which can also be an advantage, if the writer is aware of their biases and employs intelligent literary techniques). Be the theoretical framework as it may - I recently spent quite some time puzzling over aspects of literary journalism, so I'm quite over the topic at the moment - this collection shines with its intense descriptions and memorable scenes that chronicle the stories Veracruz consists of. The quality of these relatos varies (from very good to superb) since Melchor wrote them from 2002 to 2011, during which time she polished her craft to later write her best book to date, “Hurricane Season”. They are based in and around Veracruz and deal with violence, gang dealings, femicide and people smuggling. As well as coming of age in the hostile environment, when you never know whether you will be safe at the party you’re going to or whether you won’t see a mutilated body upon exiting your school. Often less focused on incidents or tragedies themselves but on the impact they have on people who experienced them, many are deeply lyrical, poetic even as in Mexico, just as in Poland, literary form of reportage (nearly non-existent in the UK and the US) is very appreciated. Reaching to folklore to talk about restless spirits or to intergenerational trauma caused by colonialism, Melchor reflects on the Mexican psyche-shaping implications of all that violence. I was captivated by many of these stories, starting with the first one about young Fernanda who mistook a drug smuggling plane for a UFO, continuing through “The House on El Estero”, a spooky horror story told by Melchor’s first husband, finishing with the very last tale, told in the second person singular (rare in literature and therefore more impressive) with the ending which was like a punch in the stomach and which elevated the whole collection. But seriously, Melchor is a writer of formidable talent. To my knowledge she currently has three books translated into English, this being the third. All of them are outstanding. Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miamiis, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’

Sophie Hughes has translated works by Laia Jufresa and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. Her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Melchor’s recent novel Paradais and her collection of non-fiction pieces, This Is Not Miami . In 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. 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 The Mexican author Fernanda Melchor uses the wrathful genre of the fairy tale to elucidate the relationship between structural crises, violence, and storytelling. In Melchor’s Mexico, people routinely attribute acts of brutality to evil spirits and bad vibes; journalist and police reports cite the presence of “witches” against whom men act in violent self-defense. Melchor sees the fairy tale — like the genres of sensationalist crime reportage and narco-literature, a subgenre that emerged in the mid-2000s — as reproducing real-world violence. Por las páginas desfilan inmigrantes ilegales, abogados de los narcos, pequeños y grandes delincuentes, prisiones, exorcismos, casas encantadas, playas...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. Having set up the mystery, the perspective of the relato shifts. This comes with Melchor’s investigation, her attempt to find the broader context, the rational explanation. With the shift comes a glimpse of the bigger picture of Veracruz. This is never a complete picture, but it is often enough to catch something of the machinations of the city’s elite, its politicians, its narcos. Where Melchor is able to get to the bottom of the story, she reveals the schemes and caprices of these people in high places. Power is so stratified that ordinary people experience the results of these schemes as incomprehensible, arbitrary mysteries: ghosts and impossibilities and sudden bursts of violence. Folk fairy tales are populated with violent sadists, monstrous figures who take their hatred out on those closest to them: there is the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who fattens the young boy up to make him more appetizing; the stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” who kills her stepson and feeds him to his own father in a delicious stew; “Bluebeard,” whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances. And then there is the paragraph-long Grimms story of a disobedient child whose hand raises from the ground as he is buried, raising with it the question of whether he is buried alive. The mother gets into the grave, lowers his hand, and then, we are told, he can finally rest peacefully.

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 “ This Is Not Miami,” her new book of not-quite-nonfiction, Fernanda Melchor tells the true story of a lynching in her home of Veracruz, a state on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In 1996, a man named Rodolfo Soler stood accused of rape and murder, and Melchor relates the townspeople’s vengeance — torturing him and burning him alive — in prose as cool as the events were grotesque. “Once he’d fallen to the floor they cut off his left foot with a machete to see if he was still alive,” she writes, “and since he continued groaning, they poured another can of fuel over him.” Still a fairly decent read in general, Melchor’s ‘cronicas’. There is a ‘story’ (a character’s story) in this collection that is based on their experience/memories of an ‘exorcism’. I think that was the most well-written one in the collection, and the reasons why coincides with all that I’ve written above so I won’t repeat myself. It simply has a better structure, and the characters felt more multi-dimensional and ‘human’ (which is ironic because this is the only piece that has ‘supernatural’ elements) instead of just being depicted as a ‘villain’ or a ‘victim’. To further clarify, I don’t think the writer was intentionally reliant on those ‘tropes’; it’s just because of the almost too simple way it’s written — it makes them seem so obviously so. Like for instance if the writer introduces a character as a ‘killer’ and a ‘rapist’ — that instantly falls into a certain stereotype, no? I think characters in Melchor’s book are too ‘flat’/obvious, and because of that, it makes them ‘not ‘real’ enough’/like a caricature. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive.’ New York Times

Advance Praise

Many of the tales circle around media stories that have become legend in the city. Others are fragments of tales that Melchor has stumbled upon, presumably through her day job as a reporter. They give the impression of listening to an ancient mariner figure, like that of El Ojón, or “Bug Eye,” one of Melchor’s sources who tells her about the Vice Belt — the cantinas or bars in Veracruz’s historical center that never closed during the height of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s rule in the 1970s.