This is Not Miami

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In 2007, a decade after her definitive sentence, Bosada’s case resurfaced as it was linked to that of Oscar Sentíes Alfonsín, a character feared by crime journalists in the early 2000s. Alfonsín, who became romantically entangled in prison with Bosada, pushed, through connections with Los Zetas, who were by then running the Veracruz carceral system, for her early release. A year later, Alfonsín was killed in the cell in which he had been put for attempting to organize another revolt. Rather than portraying perpetrators of mass violence as inhuman, Melchor forces us to see the desperation and perverse desires out of which their actions emerge. 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 Since the publication of her second novel, Hurricane Season, in English in 2020 and Paradais in 2022, which were short-listed and long-listed for the Booker Prize, respectively, Melchor, who was born in Veracruz in 1982, has been widely recognized as one of Mexico’s most promising and original writers. Fans of her work obsess over its hallucinatory intensity, the sense of being pushed entirely inside a character’s head and consumed by a psychosocial situation in which there is literally no exit. In these novels, narrative control cedes entirely to the voice of people who have perpetrated violence or have had violence done to them. Judgment, and all forms of moralism, are mercifully absent from Melchor’s stories. Melchor’s fiction has no such outsider figure, able to question and sometimes glimpse the bigger picture or the behind-the-scenes machinations. The fictional characters are completely submerged within the maelstrom of Hurricane Season or the stasis of Paradais. They experience mystery and catastrophe but cannot or will not investigate further. They live within the deceptions.

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. Fernanda Melchor doesn’t do reportage as many know it. What she writes are ‘relatos’, stories based on real incidents that people told the author, personal testimonies and stories based on long interviews. Differently from Svetlana Alexievich (who doesn’t add her own commentary), Melchor crafts tales, some sounding like essays, some others like literary fiction. Horrific, eerie, gut-wrenching, sometimes even supernatural. In this book, Bunting circumnavigates the coast, stopping off in some 40 resorts to examine the reasons behind this change of status. As well as talking to the inhabitants she considers the special role seaside towns still hold in the national imagination (63 per cent of the UK’s population lives within 15 kilometres of the sea) and looks for those ghosts of their past. Among the topics she prods at are Brexit, English nationalism and the climate emergency. What makes coastal resorts distinctive, she says, is their “liminality”, a state born of flux, the void of the sea, and their betwixt and betweenness. These are places “of second chances and last chances” and badly in need of the former.The tales, which all spiral out from real events, start off on relatively innocent footing. In one, Melchor’s nine-year-old self mistakes Colombian cocaine planes in the Veracruz night sky for UFOs — a modern kind of fairy tale. Swiftly, This Is Not Miami’s stories become more violent. “The Devil’s House,” a story told by a man who would become Melchor’s lover, concerns supernatural possession; another tale recounts Mel Gibson’s displacement of a prison population for the shooting of his 2012 film Get the Gringo. After learning the truth behind her belief in extraterrestrials, Melchor says of that belief and those stories: “They were just lies, the inventions of grown-ups.” It is a classic coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence line. But in This Is Not Miami, the lies take a specific form. No particular grown-ups have deceived her—her father found the fascination with UFOs ridiculous—but the world appears as one big lie or cover-up. The incident involving the ambush of federal police was a rare case of the truth evading government censors. Many of the tales circle around media stories that have become legend in the city. Others are fragments of tales that Melchor has stumbled upon, presumably through her day job as a reporter. They give the impression of listening to an ancient mariner figure, like that of El Ojón, or “Bug Eye,” one of Melchor’s sources who tells her about the Vice Belt — the cantinas or bars in Veracruz’s historical center that never closed during the height of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s rule in the 1970s. In this intimate medical memoir, the cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar documents the decline of his father, a prominent research geneticist, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He asks: what remains of a person after their memory is gone? His father’s story is interwoven with the history and science of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, diseases that afflict at least six million adults in the US alone. Jauhar emphasises the importance of considering dementia from a social perspective. Autopsy studies suggest that brain damage and the severity of dementia are less correlated than one might expect: having a high “psychosocial reserve” (strong relationships and a supportive environment) can protect an individual’s cognitive function even when their brain is ravaged by the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive.’ New York Times

The locals avoided Dead Man’s Beach. Every year dozens of intrepid bathers, most of them visiting from Mexico City, met their death in those treacherous waters. ‘No swimming’, read a sign a few feet from the water. ‘Bewear, deep pools’ warned a crudely painted red skull. The powerful undertow that dragged the estuary waters towards the headland in Antón Lizardo left Playa del Muerto dotted with inshore holes, depressions on the seafloor that caused unpredictable underwater currents where it was easy to drown. Melchor moves through this world, compelled by macabre and mysterious stories, while always standing a little outside of them. Because of her skepticism, because she investigates, we can glimpse what is behind all this violence—the schemes of the governor, the work of well-connected narcos. This wider perspective also implies that the current violence, the shadowy machinations in high places, will pass or change. By naming actors calling the shots in Veracruz, Melchor also allows us to trace their paths beyond the end of the book. The Zetas have splintered into warring factions, still wildly violent but not the power they once were. The political party of Herrera and Duarte has finally been ousted. Relatos” doesn’t translate well into English – “tales” or “accounts” doesn’t quite do the job. What Melchor has done in this book is try to tell the stories as honestly as possible, using the obliqueness inherent in language to the stories’ advantage (the author’s own words, more or less). What we get, therefore, is a collection of narrative non-fiction based around the Mexican city of Veracruz, all of it exploring the dark underbelly of human nature and Mexican society. Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as ‘one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices’ ( Guardian ). She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season , which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her most recent novel, Paradais , was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This Is Not Miami is a collection of narrative non-fiction pieces. Melchor’s books are published in thirty-four territories. She lives in Mexico. 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.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.

Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miamiis, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’ Melchor’s Paradais features a criminal group based on the Zetas, but the group is referred to simply as them. No one dares speak their name; everyone knows what that hushed term refers to. Here again are the lies and evasions of grown-ups, but in the novel, there is no Melchor figure to investigate and make sense of the dark shadow cast by them. 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.’ The deceptions of ordinary people in This Is Not Miami are not these major conspiracies or elite schemes. Rather, they are the silences, the rumors, and the superstitions that conjure a world of ghosts to explain extraordinary events. The lies are the decision not to ask questions or investigate. Por las páginas desfilan inmigrantes ilegales, abogados de los narcos, pequeños y grandes delincuentes, prisiones, exorcismos, casas encantadas, playas...The reader of this book will encounter relatos that refuse to enter into discourse with History with a capital H. At the heart of these texts is not the incidents themselves, but the impact they had on their witnesses. The stories are based on events that really happened .. but in their subjectiveness they go beyond straightforward testimony, homing in on the transformative experience of their protagonists The city cannot tell its own story, or any story at all. As Sartre pointed out, reality does not tell stories; that is the job of language and memory.