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. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. 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. Ya en el primer relato, a través de los ojos de una niña que cree ver ovnis en el cielo de Veracruz y más tarde descubre lo que son, la autora nos introduce a este mundo que ha perdido la inocencia, donde todo es peor de lo que parece y la única solución es resignarse y procurar sobrevivir.

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. Fernanda Melchor doesn’t do reportage as many know it. What she writes are ‘relatos’, stories based on real incidents that people told the author, personal testimonies and stories based on long interviews. Differently from Svetlana Alexievich (who doesn’t add her own commentary), Melchor crafts tales, some sounding like essays, some others like literary fiction. Horrific, eerie, gut-wrenching, sometimes even supernatural. 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.For a few years, the impact of the Zetas on Veracruz, and on Mexico itself, was so profound that they changed the vernacular, the way people spoke. A culture of joyful conversing and barroom braggadocio learned silence and circumspection. The city cannot tell its own story, or any story at all. As Sartre pointed out, reality does not tell stories; that is the job of language and memory. It's hard to understand where this refusal to succumb to despair comes from: these stories depict prison life, poverty, casual cruelties where women kill and mutilate their children, where a rapist is lynched by the family of his victim, a terrifying story of a haunted house - and yet somewhere there is a resistance to simply folding and giving up under the weight of so much misery and desolation.

The social challenge we face is how we support and value those whose memories are impaired. The challenge we face as individuals is how we relate to loved ones who both are, and aren’t, there. Jauhar experienced grief, frustration and rage as his father became increasingly irrational and volatile. His honest writing makes this a painful but important read for anyone who has lost a friend or relative to Alzheimer’s. Melchor does not get to the bottom of every mystery; her skepticism cannot debunk every tale. “The House on El Estero” is a horror story about an inexplicable exorcism. It is framed by Melchor’s partner—her future partner at the time of telling, her ex at the time of writing—relating the story and Melchor interjecting with questions and doubts.

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. 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. 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. 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.

It's honestly a fantastic collection -Melchor is a fantastic writer, one with an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, both of which lead to her creating incredibly engaging pieces. Almost all of them could have been extended, teased out into longer pieces, and the brevity of some of the articles here might leave many readers wanting more. For me, they were close to perfect.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.”

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. 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.

Advance Praise

The English title of Laurent Mauvignier’s 2020 novel, The Birthday Party, is surely a conscious reference to Harold Pinter’s 1957 play of the same name, for Mauvignier’s tale is distinctly Pinteresque in its nightmarish plot. In the 1970s, new feminist versions of folklore and fairy tale began to appear in which the silenced female figures at their heart could be seen and reclaimed. These retellings were driven by a conviction that the creativity of these tales could be rescued from their violence. But Melchor is not interested in this. Instead, she frames folklore and fairy tale within contemporary scenes of violence to show the role they continue to play in mediating what is most unbearable. 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 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.