Paradais by Fernanda Melchor Review

Franco is a fat middle-class incel kid who’s obsessed with the hot wife of a wealthy local businessman. Polo is his working-class “friend” who uses Franco for booze and who may or may not have impregnated his cousin. Franco’s obsession is tipping over from sad sex fantasies into violent reality as he enlists Polo in a mad scheme to break into the local businessman’s house and finally have sex with the wife.

Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais feels like a wasted opportunity. It had the potential to either examine the lives of incels and produce an interesting story of a break-in by two characters who are totally incapable of pulling off such a feat, and it does neither. Melchor fully resists telling any story in fact for much of the book, leading to an overwhelmingly tedious read.

Which isn’t to say that most of the novella is wasted space. She uses some of it to paint a compelling portrait of Polo’s frustrating, loveless life and you see what it’s like to live in poverty in Mexico. It’s semi-understandable why boys in his position, who see no way of improving their lot in life, turn to crime as a means of radical escape.

Also, when Melchor does decide to finally get on with the story, she can write a compelling scene. That final ten pages is as tense, confusing and disturbing as I imagine a real break-in would play out. And the scenes of violence against women are viscerally described to unnerve.

It’s just that most of the book had very little to make me want to keep turning the pages. There’s no story to speak of and, besides Polo, very weak characterisation. A character might do something nasty to another character every once in a while but most of the book is a holding-pattern for the finale when Franco and Polo finally execute their idiotic plan. It’s such a passive, unengaging reading experience.

I’m not even sure what I was meant to take away from the story. I feel like there was a vague allusion to Paradise Lost - the two locations in the story are Paradais and Progreso, which might be Paradise and Purgatory - and Polo’s cousin’s name is Milton. But, besides saying the characters are denied Heaven and must remain in Purgatory (or worse) I’m not sure what the point of it all was. And if that is its point, what an anodyne one it is.

Melchor’s view on incels is her having Polo describe Franco as fat and disgusting over and over throughout - it’s not even a surface-level look, it’s simply outright dismissive and an unwillingness to even engage with that type of person’s life. No attempt is made to understand someone like Franco or how they get to the point that he does.

I don’t know what it is with this modern trend in literary works of extremely long sentences but I’m not a fan of it. Melchor often writes page-length sentences for no reason. They don’t need to be this long and putting in commas instead of full stops adds nothing to the reading experience. All these run-on sentences do is make it harder to follow any point the writer is trying to make, and often obfuscates memorable combinations of words - which do exist in this book; I don’t think Melchor is a bad writer - by smothering it amongst one unrelenting clause after another.

Paradais has the makings of a better book that are never realised in this flat, unmemorable and underwhelming story. A patience-testing, unrewarding read that feels far longer than its relatively short length.