This is Not Miami

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Fernanda Melchor, author extraordinaire, goes literary journalism: This collection assembles thirteen non-fiction texts, mostly written between 2002 and 2011, that paint a vivid picture of Melchor's hometown of Veracruz, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. In her foreword, she ponders the relation between fiction and non-fiction, especially regarding framing and perspectives, and what terms, in English and Spanish, try to encompass different approaches to the circumstance that all writing is ultimately subjective, that objectivity is a goal one might strife for, but that it is unattainable due to our imperfect human nature (which can also be an advantage, if the writer is aware of their biases and employs intelligent literary techniques). Be the theoretical framework as it may - I recently spent quite some time puzzling over aspects of literary journalism, so I'm quite over the topic at the moment - this collection shines with its intense descriptions and memorable scenes that chronicle the stories Veracruz consists of. My thanks to @fitzcarraldoeditions and @netgalley for my copy of this book – look out for it when it’s published on 10th May. Estas ceremonias eran - y son aún - tan populares entre los veracruzanos que incluso la Iglesia católica ha empezado a ofertar regularmente misas de sanación y liberación...

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. 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.’ El horror está presente, un horror real, que se siente, incluso, en el caso de una de las crónicas, “La casa del estero”, como un soberbio cruce entre el relato de terror sobrenatural y la crónica periodística. It is, at heart, a ramble through Lviv, accompanied by a motley crew of entertaining characters, with a surreal premise centring on the (fictional) anecdote that Jimi Hendrix’s hand was pilfered by the KGB after his death and brought to Lviv’s famous Lychakiv cemetery. Plot is largely secondary here; it is Kurkov’s sly wit and eccentric imagination that give the novel such zest. Barcode

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Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miamiis, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’ 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.

This year’s International Booker Prize boasts perhaps the most diverse shortlist in its history: its six authors span four continents and two of the books were written in languages that have never been in contention for the prize before. One is Boulder, a compelling Catalan novella that emerged in 2020 and was published in English in August of last year, by the Barcelona-born poet Eva Baltasar, which I wouldn’t bet against to take home the prize. When the story opens, our unnamed narrator is about to board a merchant ship off the coast of Chile. Working as a chef on the voyage, she meets an Icelandic woman, Samsa, and falls in love. Set in and around the city of Veracruz in Mexico, This Is Not Miami delivers twelve devastating stories that spiral from real events. These cronicás —a genre unique to Latin American writing, blending reportage and fiction—probe the motivations of murderers and misfits, compelling us to understand or even empathise with them. Melchor is like a ventriloquist, using a range of distinctive voices to evoke the smells, sounds and words of this fascinating world that includes mistreated women, damaged families, refugees, prisoners and even a beauty queen. The Mexican author Fernanda Melchor uses the wrathful genre of the fairy tale to elucidate the relationship between structural crises, violence, and storytelling. In Melchor’s Mexico, people routinely attribute acts of brutality to evil spirits and bad vibes; journalist and police reports cite the presence of “witches” against whom men act in violent self-defense. Melchor sees the fairy tale — like the genres of sensationalist crime reportage and narco-literature, a subgenre that emerged in the mid-2000s — as reproducing real-world violence. 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. Whale, originally published in 2003 and considered a classic of Korean magic realism, is a rich, three-part novel that centres on a young woman, Geumbok. Inspired by the “unbelievable sight” of a blue whale cresting out of the ocean, Geumbok decides to build a cinema in her village that resembles “a large whale breaching the surface for a breath”.

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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 She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’ 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.

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.

This is Not Miami

Few places reverberate so noisily with the ghosts of their history as the English seaside resort,” writes Madeleine Bunting. The country’s coastline is spattered with towns – Felixstowe, Scarborough, Weston-super-Mare, New Brighton – that were once elegant but now include areas of severe deprivation. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.