This is Not Miami

Product Information

Los relatos suceden en Veracruz, muestran la presencia del narco, cómo ha afectado a la ciudadanía, a las prácticas culturales. Una ciudad, un puerto, la ignominia, la injusticia y un par de ojos bien abiertos que saben transformar lo escuchado, lo leído, lo vivido, en unas historias brutales.

Tóth is adept at conjuring atmosphere from small details and refined descriptions – the body of an old man, she writes, is “a vacant house, a hollow puppet, who had returned to the dwelling place of the soul”. Rombo 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. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’ Melchor’s Paradais features a criminal group based on the Zetas, but the group is referred to simply as them. No one dares speak their name; everyone knows what that hushed term refers to. Here again are the lies and evasions of grown-ups, but in the novel, there is no Melchor figure to investigate and make sense of the dark shadow cast by them.

Featured Reviews

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. 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. Sometimes the reshaping is musical: Soler’s tragic tale, for instance, is titled “Ballad of the Burned Man” and introduced through a song about him. Sometimes it’s metaphorical: In the opening personal essay, titled “Lights in the Sky,” Melchor recalls watching strings of lights in the night sky with romantic notions of imagining space aliens “searching for a more hospitable planet.” Only later does she realize that the lights are most likely narco planes. 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.

opposing yet complementary archetypes, masks that dehumanize flesh and blood women and become blank screens on which to project the desires, fears, and anxieties of a society that professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist, and misogynist.fernanda melchor's this is not miami (aquí no es miami) features a dozen crónicas and relatos ("reality doesn't have a will of its own; it doesn't have any predetermined meaning at all, which means that newspaper stories as much as novels are always, to a degree, 'fictional,' in as far as they are artificial constructs, not to be confused with life itself.") — each set in and near veracruz, where the unflinching mexican author was born. However, this is still classic Melchor, it's dark, it's violent. The The Exorcist and Mel Gibson both make an appearance. There is a forsaken ruin, the ominously named, Casa del Diablo. A beauty queen turned murderess is found with bodies in plant pots. This is a bewitching tour of the darkest corners of Veracruz, exposing the violence and corruption in ways that feel fresh and slightly risky both creatively and also probably literally.Dejé de leer Proceso porque me sumía en una profunda depresión. Los textos periodísticos del semanario, sin ser imágenes gráficas de la violencia y podredumbre humana en la que vivimos, me podían abrumar como solo recuerdo que lo haya hecho la única visita que realicé al Blog del Narco. The deceptions of ordinary people in This Is Not Miami are not these major conspiracies or elite schemes. Rather, they are the silences, the rumors, and the superstitions that conjure a world of ghosts to explain extraordinary events. The lies are the decision not to ask questions or investigate. Since the publication of her second novel, Hurricane Season, in English in 2020 and Paradais in 2022, which were short-listed and long-listed for the Booker Prize, respectively, Melchor, who was born in Veracruz in 1982, has been widely recognized as one of Mexico’s most promising and original writers. Fans of her work obsess over its hallucinatory intensity, the sense of being pushed entirely inside a character’s head and consumed by a psychosocial situation in which there is literally no exit. In these novels, narrative control cedes entirely to the voice of people who have perpetrated violence or have had violence done to them. Judgment, and all forms of moralism, are mercifully absent from Melchor’s stories.