In the latest batch of consolidating Mexican writers, Fernanda Melchor puts the direct to take over generational narrators as Juan Villoro o Laura Esquivel. Few of those literati born between the 70s and 80s get the levels of brilliance that Melchor achieves with barely disheveled in each new novel. This author manifests a precise naturalness, that of cradle writers, those endowed with the verb as a prodigy more than with any learned trope.
With his ever-intervening journalistic side, his novels end up being chronicles of survival, visits to wild places where life throbs with the disturbing cadence of the peremptory. And so the authenticity of prose and action overflows and transcends.
Literature in cases like Fernanda's point to rest and pause waiting for experiences to adorn the youth with the literature more adjusted to life and awaiting that maturity that augurs narrative delicacies of the first order. Because a present reality like Fernanda can only be based on more works of great depth. Time to time…
Top 3 recommended books by Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane season
There are places where it is always the season of hurricanes, earthquakes and any other calamities whose epicenters are injustices, uprooting and abandonment and the future as a black whirlwind that not only stalks but also inexorably invites all the inhabitants of those spaces. about to be devastated by the worst inertia.
A raw and heartbreaking novel in which the reader will be enveloped, trapped by the words and the atmosphere of terrible, yet joyous, fatality. A group of children find a body floating in the murky waters of an irrigation canal near the La Matosa ranch. The body turns out to be that of the Witch, a woman who inherited this profession from her deceased mother, and whom the inhabitants of that rural area respected and feared.
After the macabre discovery, suspicions and gossip will fall on a group of boys from the town, whom a neighbor had seen a few days before fleeing from the sorceress's house, carrying what appeared to be an inert body. From there, the characters involved in the crime will tell us their story while the readers immerse ourselves in the life of this place plagued by misery and abandonment, and where the violence of the darkest eroticism and the sordid power relations converge.
Stop
The worst events are the result of the most evil synergies, as forced by the devil himself. Between indolence and nihilism, a young mind can end up indulging in the most ominous if only a slight reinforcement ends up giving it the appropriate feedback.
In a luxury residential complex, two teenagers Misfits gather at night to secretly get drunk and share their wild fantasies. Franco Andrade, obese and lonely, addicted to pornography, dreams of seducing his next door neighbor - an attractive married woman, mother of a family - for whom he has developed an unhealthy obsession; while Polo, his reluctant partner, fantasizes about giving up his crippling job as a gardener in the exclusive subdivision and fleeing his home, his village infested with narcos, and from the yoke of his dominating mother. Faced with the impossibility of getting what each one believes they deserve, Franco and Polo will devise a plan as childish as it is macabre.
Paradais, written by Fernanda Melchor, one of the most outstanding Mexican writers of today, explores the ease with which desire can turn into obsession and, even more, into violence, while narrating the alliance between the opposite poles of contemporary Mexican society.
False hare
The darkness of the port envelops everything. Pachi and Vinicio go into the beach, they are on their way to an impromptu party; they are looking for something to numb the body, with what to finish erasing themselves. The summer has been long and the day, much worse.
Not far from there, Zahir fantasizes about his next trip to the capital or to the north of Mexico, out of reach of his aunt who demands money from him, beats him down and has forced his little brother, Andrik, to flee from the common home to end up in another: that of a man who caresses and hits with the same hand. Now he just has to convince Andrik to start a new life and make sure he finds his way out of that beach that seems to have no end.
False hare is a story that fascinates and horrifies, from which it is difficult to depart from due to the rhythm of the prose, capable of also drawing in depth characters on the edge, who experience violence and abandonment. This is the first novel by Fernanda Melchor, who has conquered an important place in Spanish-American letters.
Other recommended books by Fernanda Melchor
Here is not Miami
Miami is for dreamers with pasta and a visa. Miami is sold on the other hand as the Ithaca of America. The new gold where you can arrive speaking Spanish and succeed as soon as you are lucky, or so it is seen by those who do not have exactly the money or visa. For the rest, between dreams and frustrations, life goes on sand inside the border ...
The chronicles of Fernanda Melchor give an account of human degradation in one of its most sordid aspects. What your book does is show ignominy in all this rudeness.
In a time of blurred boundaries between truth and lies, chaos and order, horror and indolence, organized crime and the State, appears This is not Miami a book of hybrid stories, an alloy between journalism and literature, which lucidly addresses the conditions that germinated the terror of the so-called War on Drug Trafficking in a state especially hit by this debacle as is Veracruz.
Beyond the intention of delivering a hard data count, Melchor offers us stories about people: victims y criminalsYes, but above all ordinary men and women dedicated to the struggle for survival, with that deep and compassionate look of his, but raw and direct, with which it is inevitable to get involved and be moved.
El Veracruz Fernanda Melchor is not so much a setting but a character in this wave of violence. The closeness of the author with the stories she tells, and an always risky use of language, are the greatest strengths of this new edition revisited which has a new chronicle. And although these stories are framed in a temporality, they are still a reflection of a country whose sands are still moving.
You tell many lies Miss Fernanda
Sadly, he also tells a lot of truths that someone has to tell.