A Perfectly Executed Scream: On Fernanda Melchor’s “Paradais”

“I hear those sirens scream my name.”

– David Lynch, “Up in Flames”

Set in a luxury housing development in Veracruz, Mexico, Fernanda Melchor’s 2022 bid for the International Booker Prize — “Paradais” — is the sort of book that stays etched in your memory long after you’ve put it down to pack up for the spring semester. This short, chapterless novel, published by the rising Mexican novelist who garnered international acclaim for her 2017 novel, “Hurricane Season,” held me in its grips for two days straight in a feverish reading bender. Dealing with the socioeconomic dimensions of drug and alcohol abuse, the novel centers a character who attempts to cope with his hopeless life circumstances through alcohol. Narrated as a rambling stream of consciousness, one long bender isn’t too far off the mark when it comes to this work — and it’s a thrill to read.

The story follows Polo, an alcoholic high school dropout with a troubled home life in his increasing complicity with the perverted sexual fantasies of his morally bankrupt drinking companion, a friendless young resident in the housing development. Melchor’s circuitous style withholds the chilling magnitude of the novel’s climax until the end, raising her narrator to his full human height before plunging him from “Paradais” into hell.

To call this book’s narrative style “stream of consciousness” is rather an understatement: The novel is a torrent of consciousness, a proper deluge. Unraveling the speaker’s tangled memories, Melchor takes her reader for a figurative river cruise toward depravity, frequently invoking imagery perfectly at home in “The Heart of Darkness.” But unlike Joseph Conrad’s colonial novel, the tragedy in this book is set, literally, in the “backyard” rather than a distant colony of an exploitative class. While “The Heart of Darkness” sought to reflect the moral depravity underlying the pretense of the colonial “civilizing mission” in Africa, “Paradais” deals with a dark underbelly of marginalized individuals in close, unavoidable proximity to the ruling class.

The patronizing notion of Latin America as “America’s Backyard” — recalling the long lineage of U.S. imperialism in South and Central America politicians since the Monroe Doctrine — carries an implicit assumption of who owns the figurative house, so to speak. This power dynamic, conceptualized in the “backyard” as a peripheral property outside the locus of power, is concretely represented in the physical and social distance between the wealthy homeowners and the underpaid groundskeepers of their gated community.

It is here, in the gated community of Paradais on the banks of the Jamapa River, where the novel’s speaker works a menial job maintaining the property, literally picking up feces under the gazes of the Mexican elite. The sharp contrast between the neatly trimmed lawn beside the settlement’s crystal-clear pool and the backyard jungle fringing the Jamapa’s murk establishes the socioeconomic boundaries that the novel’s characters chafe against and transgress.

The prose — what kept me reading in the first place — is simultaneously tight, breathless, and sprawling, every digression uncovering more of the narrator’s psychological iceberg. This was by far the most compelling aspect of the book for me, keeping me invested through its surgical analysis of the narrator’s spiraling descent. Culminating in an act of violence, the book shines in its intimate depiction of psychological alienation. Giving the reader a direct tap into the narrator’s mind, Melchor puts us in the shoes of a person desperate for a way out of his predicament who surrenders his conscience in a desperate bid to escape his own life. The narrator’s vision of the world becomes increasingly jaded, guilt-ridden, and self-effacing, resulting in a book that paints a powerful portrait of alienation but feels largely stuck in a single emotional key. As a scream, it is perfectly executed. As a song, it just misses the bullseye, lacking some of the emotional registers and nuances that a more ambitious work might have achieved.

To some degree, it is difficult to blame the novel for its heavily stylized graphics. An unsentimental approach is to be expected from this sort of book, one written as though from the barrel of a gun. Its feverish intensity comes, perhaps inevitably, at the cost of a more nuanced exploration of humanity. The psychological richness that I loved in the narrator was largely absent from the other characters, or at least submerged in a deep cesspool of turpitude. Yet it does come through in moments of sober reflection and prayer peppered throughout this thick cocktail of a book. In the book’s final pages, Polo is left to face a sobering reality he can no longer escape. When the sun finally comes up, Melchor forces her reader, like her narrator, to reckon with what’s left.