276°
Posted 20 hours ago

This is Not Miami

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

The prize can, of course, only go to one book, but the announcement brings to mind just how many excellent works of translated fiction have been published in the past few months. Here are some of the best. Boulder Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

In the early nineties, Playa del Muerto, or Dead Man’s Beach, was little more than a strip of greyish sand located in the city of Boca del Río, a city in the municipality of the same name, just south of Veracruz. Its scorching dunes were covered in thorny shrubs, which were littered with rotten branches and plastic bottles that the river dragged down from the mountains when the waters were high. It wasn’t a busy or particularly pretty beach (if any of the beaches in this part of the Gulf of Mexico can said to be truly pretty) and there were times – especially during high tide or storms – when the sand would disappear entirely and not even the breakwaters could prevent the waves from crashing onto the highway connecting the two cities. 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.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. Told from a mother’s perspective, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s fourth novel looks something like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, but is woven through with a compelling exploration of race and religion. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’ She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’

Pocos son los libros que te toman del cuello y no te sueltan. Fernanda Melchor (1982) y su “Aquí no es Miami” (2013) es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de ellos. Cada cuento es como una pieza de un puzzle, sin demasiado sentido por sí misma, pero cuando las juntas todas tienes un retrato auténtico de la ciudad de Veracruz y de toda la violencia que acompaña al narcotráfico y que afecta a las vidas diarias de la gente, aunque se hayan acostumbrado a este estado de cosas. Dejé de leer Proceso porque me sumía en una profunda depresión. Los textos periodísticos del semanario, sin ser imágenes gráficas de la violencia y podredumbre humana en la que vivimos, me podían abrumar como solo recuerdo que lo haya hecho la única visita que realicé al Blog del Narco.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

And finally, it’s sentences like the above which felt like they came straight out of a forgettable, dated ‘noir’ film/ ‘film noir’ that really didn’t sit well with me (and ultimately killed the ‘flow’/’mood’). I just thought it could have been done a bit better? But what do I even know. Should I limit myself to reading books by dead writers? I often seem overly ‘offensive’ but it’s the text I’m referring to, and not the writer. But in any case, 3* means I ‘liked’ the book, and would recommend it, so there you go. I want to read Paradais.She is a fearless writer; bold, uncompromising and brutal. She wants her readers to feel the reality of life in the parts of Mexico that don’t make global headlines, that we, in other countries don’t hear about. Yeah sure, we have an inclination from movies and fictional literature, but Melchor’s aim is to bring real events into her work to unmask the reality, brutality and often horror of life in some of the more remote and non-tourist parts of Mexico. 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. 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.' Me ha encantado 'La casa del Estero', que comienza como un relato de género sobre una casa encantada y nos introduce en el mundo de los curanderos y el exorcismo, lo cual nos hace asomarnos a las creencias primigenias de la ciudad. Book Genre: Essays, Latin American, Latin American Literature, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Spanish Literature, Womens

Seamlessly translated by Sophie Hughes from the initial Spanish, This Is Not Miami is a compelling read. However, be warned; these tales may well devour your dreaming.’ Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miamiis, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’ These learned ways of speaking pervade This Is Not Miami. The final relato is entitled “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” a variant on a familiar formulation for talking about areas under the dominion of the Zetas (zeta is the Spanish word for the letter z). Óscar Martínez’s 2016 book A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, for example, contains a chapter called “Guatemala Is Spelled with a Z.” But with Melchor as a character, exploring and archiving Veracruz, we do get a clearer picture. While this Veracruz is similarly bleak to the one we see in her other works, it is also Veracruz positioned within a specific context. We follow along as Melchor traces changes during a grim period for the city and state: the governorship of Fidel Herrera Beltrán and the takeover of the state by Los Zetas. This Is Not Miami is a collection of vignettes from Melchor’s early years as a writer in Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s gulf coast. The book is made up of 12 “relatos”—tales or accounts loosely based on true stories—but some of these contain multiple vignettes threaded together by a common theme. Many of the vignettes were related to her by Veracruz locals and then retold by Melchor, while others are her own tales.Folk fairy tales are populated with violent sadists, monstrous figures who take their hatred out on those closest to them: there is the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who fattens the young boy up to make him more appetizing; the stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” who kills her stepson and feeds him to his own father in a delicious stew; “Bluebeard,” whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances. And then there is the paragraph-long Grimms story of a disobedient child whose hand raises from the ground as he is buried, raising with it the question of whether he is buried alive. The mother gets into the grave, lowers his hand, and then, we are told, he can finally rest peacefully. El horror está presente, un horror real, que se siente, incluso, en el caso de una de las crónicas, “La casa del estero”, como un soberbio cruce entre el relato de terror sobrenatural y la crónica periodística. 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. 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. Having set up the mystery, the perspective of the relato shifts. This comes with Melchor’s investigation, her attempt to find the broader context, the rational explanation. With the shift comes a glimpse of the bigger picture of Veracruz. This is never a complete picture, but it is often enough to catch something of the machinations of the city’s elite, its politicians, its narcos. Where Melchor is able to get to the bottom of the story, she reveals the schemes and caprices of these people in high places. Power is so stratified that ordinary people experience the results of these schemes as incomprehensible, arbitrary mysteries: ghosts and impossibilities and sudden bursts of violence.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment