Stories We Don’t Want to Hear
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
With the exception of graphomaniac marvels like John Grisham, Danielle Steele, or Stephen King, authors don’t generally publish three books in four years. Rebecca Makkai did it in the early 2010s (though she doesn’t want credit for it). Rick Moody and Anne Carson did it in the 1990s. And I’m sure others have too, although they didn’t show up in the Google search that returned the names listed above. It would theoretically be more feasible for authors to have multiple books appear in translation in rapid succession. After all, the books have almost always already been published in their original language, and thus can be acquired, translated, and published—an unquestionably time-consuming process—on whatever schedule is desired. Don Bartlett’s translations of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle, which came out between 2013 and 2018, presumably benefited from such logistics, as the originals were published from 2009 to 2011. And Ann Goldstein’s translations of Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, which were published from 2012 to 2015, lagged their originals by only a year. Regardless of the machinations, for one translator to have three titles by one author hit the shelves within four years is remarkable and, when the books aren’t part of a series, incredibly rare. Yet that is exactly what Sophie Hughes has done with the work of Mexican author Fernanda Melchor.
Critical praise for Hughes’s translation of Melchor’s Hurricane Season has been deservedly effusive since New Directions published the novel in March 2020. A propulsive exploration of four individuals variously connected to the brutal murder of the village “Witch,” the novel was, among numerous other accolades, short-listed for the International Booker Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Two years later, Melchor and Hughes were back on English-language shelves—and the Booker International nominations list—with Paradais. That novel also concerns a crime, albeit one that is even less present in the text than the murder in Hurricane Season. Part of what makes Melchor’s work so enthralling is how it focuses not on acts of violence themselves—although both novels contain plenty of such acts—but on violence’s effects on a society where it has become commonplace.
Hurricane Season is Melchor’s second novel, originally released as Temporada de huracanes in 2017, followed by Páradais (the Spanish title has an accent) in 2021. Her debut, Aquí no es Miami, is a collection of unclassifiable writings about Veracruz, where Melchor was born, that came out in 2013, the same year her first novel, Falsa liebre, did. That novel remains untranslated, but her debut collection is now available in another of Hughes’s characteristically polished English translations, under the title This Is Not Miami (New Directions).
There are few through lines between the three English-language books, yet This Is Not Miami, which focuses on why individuals are driven to commit acts of violence and how those acts affect victims, innocents, and society as a whole, can be read as a mind map or anticipatory annotations for her later fiction. Mostly written between 2002 and 2011, these twelve pieces are based on reporting done by Melchor, who earned a journalism degree from Universidad Veracruzana. All tease at themes—resignation, desperation, misogyny, the occult, spiritualism, cartels—that she would develop more fully, though no less realistically, in her fiction. The distinctive narrative style that characterizes Hurricane Season and Paradais—comma-catenated clauses spun into lengthy insistent sentences wending down entire pages—is presaged in just one piece, “Life’s Not Worth a Thing.” The collection’s other works are stylistically varied, albeit in conventional forms, resembling magazine articles or short fiction. What is noticeably absent from This Is Not Miami, particularly for readers who were introduced to Melchor through her English-language novels, is the sex, slang, and swearing.
In her author’s note, Melchor says that she prefers to call the pieces that make up This Is Not Miami either crónicas, “a hybrid form at once informative and interpretive, which has no entirely satisfying translation in English,” or relatos, which “in English might be closest to accounts.” She caveats the collection with misgivings about the treachery of language, the artificial constructs of reality, and alterations made to protect sources, but concludes that “[t]he only fiction I’m prepared to acknowledge in these texts is the fiction inherent in every construct of language.” Whether Melchor’s writing is completely “true,” totally fabricated, or something in between doesn’t really matter. The stories she tells about the consequences of impassioned reactions, ingrained behaviors, neglect, and despair, resonate. The stories “could have taken place anywhere,” as she points out in the conclusion to her author’s note, “but, driven by some implacable fate, [they] came to be told in this place.”
Shortly after Hurricane Season’s publication, Hughes interviewed Melchor in these pages. There, Hughes echoes Melchor’s statement of universality, writing that the novel “tells stories we don’t want to hear; unbearable stories of abuse and neglect that take place in Mexico in the novel, but all over the world in real life.” Indeed, the characterization could also apply to the eventual winner of 2020’s International Booker, Michele Hutchison’s translation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, with the qualification that Rijneveld’s “unbearable stories of abuse and neglect” happen to take place in their native Netherlands.
Such “unbearable stories” take place in the United States all too often, and an increasingly boisterous element in our politics would consign those “stories [they] don’t want to hear,” be they fictional or historic, to the darkened back alleyways of schools, universities, and libraries, hoping that they will, with time, become forgotten. Those censors and scolds would do well to listen to Hughes and Melchor discuss the value of such universal tales, which the two have done in numerous forums over the past four years. In a conversation for Granta in February of 2020, Melchor told Hughes that she has “always thought literature’s task is to create empathy, [to] put ourselves in other people’s places . . . For me, this means I must try to tell a story in a way that prompts the reader to wonder, what are the true differences between her and this ruthless character she’s reading about?” Perhaps those who are banning books in the United States are frightened by how empathy can lead to recognition. Perhaps they believe that if they force themselves and others to look away, to ignore certain truths—that the discomfort that often accompanies recognition will cease to be quite so familiar, and the truths will become lies. (Or perhaps they are simply smug bigots. Who can say?) Many have shared their interpretations of Hurricane Season, but no review or critical essay can surpass the experience of reading the intensely visceral story itself. Nor can they improve upon the novel’s steady revelations about several characters’ sexuality, gender, and homophobia, issues that are distressingly relevant in the United States, where trans people, drag shows, and LGBTQ Americans are being targeted politically in increasingly strident and alarming tones.
While the search for empathy and understanding is also operative in This Is Not Miami, Melchor has said that, while writing Paradais, she was less concerned with “trying to find out the meaning behind [the] violence.” In June 2022, she told The Nation that “[f]or a long time I’ve tried to write stories that show how violence is something we all carry within us. But there are things that lead us toward or away from that violence . . . when I started Paradais, I realized that I didn’t want to justify or even understand why violence happens. Instead I wanted to show how sometimes violence happens for no good reason at all. Or for the stupidest possible reason.” That Polo and Franco, Paradais’ teen protagonists, would see a woman as the disposable means to their ends (escape from the confines of their town of Paradais; fulfillment of a sexual fantasy) is utterly unsurprising based even solely on the novel’s very first pages. There, sixteen-year-old Polo appraises Señora Marián as he would a sports car or animal in a zoo—her “lips painted a scandalous red,” her “bare arms,” her “eyebrows raised in coquettish complicity,” her “eye-catching necklaces”—while at the same time insisting he doesn’t share the “fatboy’s obsession” with her. Similarly, many American politicians and journalists would do well to consider that there doesn’t always have to be a complicated reason why the kid who posts hateful messages to his Facebook page decides to go on a shooting spree. That he has access to a gun and exists in a culture that has shown him—again and again and again and again—that the way to process his hatred, confusion, or self-loathing is through violence is often reason enough. This isn’t to endorse that sentiment any more than Paradais endorses the behavior of Polo and Franco. It is only to highlight the fact that sometimes the only reason is “because.”
Lack of empathy aside, Paradais does share many themes with This Is Not Miami, including something which is absent from Hurricane Season: the presence of Mexico’s drug traffickers. In September 2021, Hughes wrote a thoughtful meditation for Frieze on the hegemony of the English language, where she pointed out that there is “still some expectation on the part of mainstream publishers and readers for a novel by a Mexican writer . . . to be about cartels and sicarios.” In the past, Melchor told Hughes that she didn’t want to contribute to “mythologizing the drug lords.” When speaking to The Nation about Paradais, however, Melchor acknowledged the reality of narcotrafficking in Mexico. “If I wanted to write about a small rural town in Veracruz, I had to write about narcotrafficking. That’s how Mexico is.” She elaborated: “In Mexico, there’s been a long discussion—since at least the ’80s—of what the proper role of the drug trade should be in literature . . . I felt that I didn’t want to add to that debate. Not because I think it isn’t important—I was interested instead in how narcotrafficking, like capitalism, becomes a pressure point on people. I wanted the drug trade to appear . . . as yet another source of power among others. Part of the landscape.”
That approach—almost normalizing these disturbing and violent forces—features brilliantly in Hurricane Season as well, where Melchor presents the novel’s many horrors as almost background noise, thereby training her focus on observing how violence affects and often destroys lives. In June 2020, as part of the University of Oxford’s Translation Day, Hughes explained that all of the abuse and violence in Hurricane Season “is not shocking at all for the people of La Matosa because it is their daily, lived experience, experience [that] is no less real for being fictional. Experiences we commit to sharing when we pick up Fernanda’s novel, which is very different from the observation involved in say reading a news article.”
That’s an apposite comparison because, as Hughes was well aware, Melchor makes it herself in This Is Not Miami. Beyond discussing the differences and similarities between fiction, truth, and her crónicas or relatos, Melchor explores the shared impact of lived experience in many of the collection’s individual accounts. In the opener, “Lights in the Sky,” Melchor herself appears. The year is 1991, and the author is nine years old. She writes that Veracruz had become obsessed with UFO sightings, as had she, learning “everything there was to know on the subject.” A precocious child, or simply one who adored Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Melchor shows early affinity with the empathy she attaches to her fiction, positing that the visitors might be “lonely . . . perhaps because [she herself] felt lonely and removed from the world, even within [her] own family.”
When adults appear in the story, their experience allows them to quickly grasp what’s really going on: the UFOs are narco planes. But Melchor will not make that connection for ten years. When the scales fall from her eyes, it is with bitter disappointment. And that disappointment has far-reaching consequences: “Later on, not even God would escape my cynicism,” she writes. “I don’t look for aliens anymore—my heart’s not in it.” The young dreamer she was “has ceased to exist.” That sentiment is echoed in the collection’s final piece, “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” in which one unnamed character says, “You start to well up but wipe your tears away in anger: you’re not a little girl anymore, you can’t just cry over people you don’t even know.” The piece is a powerful assemblage of sketches, including one of an episode in which a girl is warned not to look at the narcos hanging out in the nightclub for fear of being abducted. (Norma in Hurricane Season faces this same danger. There, it’s implied she narrowly avoids being kidnapped both on the highway before she reaches La Matosa and in the park before Luismi approaches her.)
Melchor also plays a role in “The House on El Estero,” though largely an impassive one. She is a twenty-four-year-old listening to a man named Jorge, who will become her first husband, as he relates the story of the “most fucked-up thing” that ever happened to him. As a teenager, he and a few friends visited the Casa del Diablo, and one of the girls seemingly became possessed, leading to events straight out of The Exorcist. The Casa del Diablo strongly evokes the house in Paradais where Polo and Franco drink in the zaguan after the rains come, forcing them to abandon the dock. The story, which delves deeply into magic and witchcraft, topics critical to the mythology—and perhaps the reality—of the Witch in Hurricane Season, is authoritatively explored by the Mexican philosopher Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo in a piece for the New York Review of Books.
A story I would love to see Melchor elaborate on is “The Vice Belt.” Its subject is the network of cantinas and bars where Veracruz’s working classes hung out in the 1970s. It’s also where con men and thieves like “El Ojón, or Bug Eye”—everyone in Melchor’s writing has great nicknames—got their starts. El Ojón’s rise echoes that of Henry Hill, another real-life criminal whose story is related in, among other places, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. It’s even possible to imagine Hughes’s evocative translation rendered by say, Diego Luna, in the style of Ray Liotta’s Scorsese voiceover: “All sorts of deals went on in those bars, which welcomed anyone from the day laborers—known as ‘cuijes’— looking for temporary work down at the docks, to the union leaders who offered such jobs in exchange for a fee: fat men dripping in gold chains who spent their days smoking Cuban cigars and drinking cognac while their cuijes—strong, eager boys like El Ojón—slogged their guts out down on the port’s basic docks.”
Throughout This is Not Miami, Hughes opts to retain a handful of Spanish words like cuijes above, choices that add atmosphere and make several of the accounts read more like the fleshed-out worlds of fiction. Some of these words are defined within the text, but others are left for the reader to chase down if they are unfamiliar with the term. That includes words like caguama (a liter of beer), madrinas (godmother, but also slang for a stool pigeon), franeleros (kind of roving valet parkers), and norteño (someone from northern Mexico). Other times, the preserved detail would presumably be amusing to Spanish-speaking readers as well, such as the moment in the titular story where a man orders two tacos, “one with papa and chorizo, the other with papa and huevo, or ‘buebo,’ as the lady who served them pronounced it.”
The whole Vice Belt lifestyle comes to an end, according to El Ojón, because of a political decision. Whatever the real reason, the result is that a “fuckload of men lost their jobs,” leading to the disillusionment that defines so many of Melchor’s characters. In the five accounts that conclude the collection, criminals like El Ojón have given way to Los Zetas and other drug dealers. These pieces are more varied in style and substance, some taking the form of unfinished notes, two written in third person, and one debuting the run-on style of the novels. All are dominated by the consequences of the burgeoning drug trade, from crack cocaine arriving in Veracruz in “Don’t Mess with My Boys,” to El Fito stumbling into life as a narco in “A Good Asset.” The latter story’s message seems to be “we don’t choose the lives we live, but we get what we get”—a fatalistic observation that deftly presages Milton’s storyline in Paradais. The fate of Polo’s beloved cousin also has roots in “Life’s Not Worth a Thing,” where a lawyer friend of Fer tells her about being approached to do work for Los Zetas. Milton’s abduction is much more violent than what we read of the lawyer’s experience, but neither man has any say in their future. (Both also react exactly the same way to their first meeting with the cartels, as their “balls [shrank/shrunk] to the size of peanuts.”)
The “Ballad of the Burned Man” bears the closest thematic connection to a story that Melchor has told several times about the origins of Hurricane Season. As she put it while guesting on the Tin House podcast “Between the Covers,” in May 2020: “I read once in the newspaper around the year 2012, I think . . . about a witch who was murdered in a small village in the outskirts of the port of Veracruz.” She “toyed” with going to report the story, but concluded the region was “too dangerous.” She also didn’t believe she could “get to the heart of the crime” just by going and talking to people, realizing—correctly, as the success of Hurricane Season shows—that she “could do that research through fiction to explore these awkward dark feelings and emotions inside myself thinking that in the end, we’re all human beings, and what happens to one of us is practically what could happen to anybody else.“
In “Ballad of the Burned Man,” the first-person plural narrator, who may or may not include Melchor, tries to uncover the truth about an incident in the small community of Tatahuicapa. There, in 1996, Rodolfo Soler, “known to the community as a cattle thief, rapist, and marijuana fiend,” was found “next to the body of Doña Anita.” Refusing to risk Soler being set free again by the conventional justice system, community members proceed to beat, torture, and lynch him. When the narrator travels to Tatahuicapa, no one wants to talk to them or help them, confirming those hesitations that gave rise to Hurricane Season. As the account’s narrator puts it, “Everyone around here is related, so they know not to go around shooting their mouths off.”
In addition to its relevance to Melchor’s own work, This Is Not Miami is also in conversation with works by Central and South American authors whose books, to varying degrees, walk the line between reportage and fiction: Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer and Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill, which was also translated by Hughes, to name but two. The latter is particularly relevant to “Queen, Slave, Woman,” in which Melchor considers the fate of Evangelina Tejera Bosada. A twenty-four-year-old former Veracruz Carnival queen, Bosada was convicted of murdering her two young children, chopping them up, and hiding their bodies in a large potted plant on her balcony. The story questions (as does Zerán’s book) the societal structure that led to the crime—in Melchor’s case, a world where “this woman who, just six years earlier, had been crowned by the people of Veracruz as their glitzy queen . . . was now being accused by the very same community of an unspeakable crime?”
More than any other book, however, This Is Not Miami reminded me of the Argentine author Selva Almada’s Dead Girls, as translated by Annie McDermott. (Melchor cites another book called The Dead Girls in an epigraph for Hurricane Season, although that title is by Jorge Ibargüengoitia.) Like Melchor, Almada also has published two English-language novels and one book of nonfiction. Both Dead Girls and This Is Not Miami are influenced by their authors having grown up in societies where violence toward women, catalyzed by misconceptions about masculinity, is pervasive. And both authors also approach their themes differently in their fiction, where they enhance the knowledge gained via their reporting. What is tragic is that both authors—one living and writing in Argentina, the other in Mexico—encountered these stories “we don’t want to hear” in their formative years. Both authors also remind us that these are stories that could happen anywhere, but they seem to be happening everywhere.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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