Name: Paradais
Rating: 3.52 (25 reviews)
ISBN: 9788439737711

Fernanda Melchor

Paradais

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor - an attractive married woman and mother - while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society - with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies - and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

lala

So… I had to admit that I bought this predominantly because I wanted to read Fitzcarraldo books… This book explore two teenage misfits set in a luxurious housing complex. This book delves into Mexican society and its racist, classist and hyper-violent tendencies. Although it’s interesting how the two titular character in the book have different upbringing which reflects into their actions in the book, I honestly feel that this book is too.. rough? for me? I get that the main characters are all mens but this book just feels too manly and brute. It feels like getting inside the head of teenage boys and it’s not particularly a sight that I liked. I do like the racist and classist allusions that this book makes, but overall it’s not a high rated book for me.

Author of the acclaimed novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor leads us into a different kind of hell: paradise

I understand what this book was trying to do and the author is a talented writer but it was way more vulgar than I expected (my own fault). 

starlingbright✨

3.7 ⭐️😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Vortex writing. Imagine Stephen Dixon & Marie Redonnet throwing a Project X-level house party, but instead of the flame thrower drug dealer busting the party, it’s the cartel that shows up. 

Jeremy Boyd

Paula Villoria

Me ha gustado a medias. La historia es horrible y desde el principio te hace sentir incomodísima pero la trama va tan rápido y genera tanta tensión que no puedes dejar de leerlo. Me ha gustado mucho la forma en la que está escrito y el vocabulario mexicano a full pero la historia me ha dejado bastante helade.

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener (and general doormat) within the gated community, and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each faced with the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves,Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of the most thrilling and critically-acclaimed contemporary writers,Paradise explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society--with its racist, classist, hyper-violent tendancies--and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

Fraser Simons

Primarily centered on two highly misogynistic men, one impoverished, one coming from privilege, who collude in taking out their aggressions upon an object of desire in a rich, gated community in which one of them works a menial job. 

This reminded me quite a bit of Lolita, in so far as the perspective is able to tap into the consciousness of Polo, the main protagonist and labourer, and is primarily concerned with his spiralling thoughts as we get closer to the actual event the two men perpetrate. It’s coached in excuses and justifications in an attempt to garner sympathy from the reader even as it doubled back on itself and illustrates the way some of the information we get is completely false, or else altered, in an effort to allow Polo to think of himself as the protagonist of his story. It’s quite clever and I think works increasingly well as the narrative builds up its tension incrementally from the very first line.

The issue I had with this is a structural one. I get hung up on perspectives of narrators, and this feels so odd it shook me out of the fiction quite often. It’s privy to odd details while purporting most of the time to be a steam-of-consciousness like thing for Polo. It’s malleable with time, it separates from Polo for a time to look at the other perp. It just doesn’t actually seem like anyone could be telling the story in the way it is. It’s not a campfire story, it’s not a person; it’s just framing that doesn’t work for me. And on top of this the text is incredibly dense. Walls and walls of text for 10-15 pages at a time. Luckily, the prose work is excellent and flow is great so it isn’t too taxing, though hard on the eyes. 

But it, again, seems like it communicated initially that Polo is racing toward the end and frantic perhaps, spiralling. But then because of the framing it makes no sense, as it sometimes is not Polo and so why is it solely possessing that characteristic in the dense paragraph structure? It reinforced my gripe over and over, a constant irritant. However I buddy read this was a great reader who had no problems at all, so I do think this is just a me, thing. But it does degrade my rating because I don’t measure my enjoyment, but do think it’s a legitimate craft issue.

Otherwise, it fulfills a lot of goals. It’s an intense story that humanizes the men, illustrating the systemic issues unaddressed, leading them to their crime. But also indicts them and holds them to account while it articulates their, frankly, lame excuses and privileged-as-men outlook as to what had happened. It’s a disgusting point-of-view, being in their heads, and that’s the point. A difficult thing to pull off that feels relatively effortless for the author. A lot here to like, I think. I’ll certainly pickup Hurricane Season after this effort.

Paradais

Reviews

Highlights