Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today. Absolutely stunning.’ Melchor resists the seductive burden of explaining the realities (or exaggerations) of such non-European regions in blistering, true-crime detail. Though based on real events, these relatos are decidedly not journalistic, and not even realist. Melchor’s prose blooms under that strange light.’ Pocos son los libros que te toman del cuello y no te sueltan. Fernanda Melchor (1982) y su “Aquí no es Miami” (2013) es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de ellos.

El estilo de esta autora es muy personal, una especie de crónica periodística seminovelada, que con un lenguaje preciso y austero nos va transmitiendo unos hechos terribles, que no necesitan demasiada elaboración ni comentario. File this alongside other contemporary Latin American women authors who are combining intense, engaging, politicised and hard-hitting writing with a sense of literature as itself a form of humanism and resistance. The fable-like narrative chops between different time periods, a plethora of characters and references to Korean folklore. It is a shame that it took until January of this year to get an English translation, because Whale is an enchanting epic that fully deserves its place on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv 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. She is a fearless writer; bold, uncompromising and brutal. She wants her readers to feel the reality of life in the parts of Mexico that don’t make global headlines, that we, in other countries don’t hear about. Yeah sure, we have an inclination from movies and fictional literature, but Melchor’s aim is to bring real events into her work to unmask the reality, brutality and often horror of life in some of the more remote and non-tourist parts of Mexico.

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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.’ Hace tiempo que llevo oyendo hablar de Fernanda Melchor, especialmente de su último libro, 'Temporada de huracanes' y he querido empezar por este libro de relatos publicado con anterioridad. 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. In this book, Bunting circumnavigates the coast, stopping off in some 40 resorts to examine the reasons behind this change of status. As well as talking to the inhabitants she considers the special role seaside towns still hold in the national imagination (63 per cent of the UK’s population lives within 15 kilometres of the sea) and looks for those ghosts of their past. Among the topics she prods at are Brexit, English nationalism and the climate emergency. What makes coastal resorts distinctive, she says, is their “liminality”, a state born of flux, the void of the sea, and their betwixt and betweenness. These are places “of second chances and last chances” and badly in need of the former.

The reader of this book will encounter relatos that refuse to enter into discourse with History with a capital H. 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 .. but in their subjectiveness they go beyond straightforward testimony, homing in on the transformative experience of their protagonists

Advance Praise

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. 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 menacing portrait of Veracruz and its inhabitants. In her third book ‘This is not Miami’, Melchor uses the form of ‘crónicas’ - unique to Latin American writing, a blend of reportage, narrative non-fiction using novelistic forms. These short stories, if you will, are all based on fact. Sophie Hughes translated each of these texts into English, and again in This Is Not Miami, she captures the swaggering vernacular of Melchor’s Veracruz. Only one of the relatos, previously unpublished, uses the lengthy, polyvocal paragraphs of Melchor’s later work. The others showcase Melchor writing, and Hughes translating, in a lighter and more conversational style.

Por las páginas desfilan inmigrantes ilegales, abogados de los narcos, pequeños y grandes delincuentes, prisiones, exorcismos, casas encantadas, playas... These learned ways of speaking pervade This Is Not Miami. The final relato is entitled “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” a variant on a familiar formulation for talking about areas under the dominion of the Zetas (zeta is the Spanish word for the letter z). Óscar Martínez’s 2016 book A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, for example, contains a chapter called “Guatemala Is Spelled with a Z.” 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.Told from a mother’s perspective, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s fourth novel looks something like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, but is woven through with a compelling exploration of race and religion. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild The last few years have seen a glut of excellent South and Central American fiction being translated into English. Fernanda Melchor, whose novels Hurricane Season and Paradais are two of the most thrillingly visceral translated works to hit English bookshops in recent times, is one of those leading the charge.

Lights in the Sky” frames This Is Not Miami in another way. It acts as an origin story for Melchor the writer, the investigator of macabre Veracruz. Reflecting on the revelation, she writes, “I don’t think I’ve ever believed in anything the way I believed in extraterrestrial beings.” Throughout the rest of the relatos, Melchor collects similarly mysterious stories, but she also tries to see through them to what’s really happening in Veracruz.PDF / EPUB File Name: This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.pdf, This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.epub And finally, it’s sentences like the above which felt like they came straight out of a forgettable, dated ‘noir’ film/ ‘film noir’ that really didn’t sit well with me (and ultimately killed the ‘flow’/’mood’). I just thought it could have been done a bit better? But what do I even know. Should I limit myself to reading books by dead writers? I often seem overly ‘offensive’ but it’s the text I’m referring to, and not the writer. But in any case, 3* means I ‘liked’ the book, and would recommend it, so there you go. I want to read Paradais. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. 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.