Melchor seems fascinated by the gratuitousness of violence, by the absence of any sense of responsibility. Melchor must have been aware of the risks of this decision: if the novel doesn’t care, why should the reader?. Since they don’t care who Señora Marián is, in other words, the novel doesn’t care, either. The novel stays stubbornly within the vantage of the two friends who plan to attack her its narrative choices mimic their highly circumscribed empathy. We never get to know Señora Marián as anything other than Franco’s object of desire. But Melchor is primarily a novelist, not a journalist, and there are no concessions here to any kind of reportorial completeness. But the new novel departs from the previous one in important ways: it is more contained, less daring, less ambitious it is, in a peculiar way, more reader-friendly. Paradais is a portrait of an ailing society inured to its own cruelty, and employs long paragraphs and supple sentences, always alive to the rhythms of speech. She has already conquered a significant place in Hispanic-American literature. And they establish Melchor, who was born in 1982, as the latest of Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable. With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex.
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