No redemption in this paradise lost
The fantasies that distort reality slither through Paradais, the gated community that sets Fernanda Melchor’s garden of Eden and gives her latest novel its name. Macabre characters drive the plot and slithering syntax the prose, guiding Melchor’s tale into the shadows of a society locked by chains.
Outcast teenagers Leopoldo Garcia Chaparro, or Polo, and Franco Andrade, or Fatboy, shape the novel’s central collisions. Told from the close third narrator, readers are brought in closer to Polo’s world. The residence’s “muchacho” travels between Progreso, his neighboring village, and Paradais, where he is a gardener. He is “dark skinned and ugly as sin,” according to his mother. Caught between his mother’s domineering control and the ominous drug cartels that slither through Progreso, Polo draws out his days with Fatboy, one of Paradais’ residents. Fatboy steals money from his grandparents to buy booze and cheesy snacks, the main incentive for Polo’s company. Fatboy obsesses over his neighbor, Senora Marian, a married woman and mother, who he fetishizes in grotesque detail. Portrayed through Polo’s interpretation, readers feel the immense loathing he feels toward Fatboy’s charmed predicament, his luxurious future a spoon-fed assurance. It’s a marked contrast to Polo’s, which is locked in the marred contours of colonial subjugation.
The two form a relationship rooted in loneliness and desperation that culminates in a scheme to obtain their ultimate escapist desires, with the respective consequences playing out Mexico’s racist, classist and sexist fate. Between the basic instincts and curdled socialization that boil the plot, the
story’s thrill only grows in catastrophic momentum.
Melchor has added a necessary work to the gothic genre resonant with the social fragilities of today’s Mexico, the geopolitical vulnerability it speaks to defiant of aesthetic pretensions and moralistic conclusions. Amidst the black river that flows out in the margins of the sea, the relations between characters who populate the world’s parasitic tendencies, and the cavernous fate to which the protagonists are brought, there is no redemption in this paradise lost. — Amancai Biraben, Associated Press
Nearly six decades after his assassination in Dallas,
President John F. Kennedy and his legacy remain an obsession for historians and the public alike. Mark K. Updegrove’s “Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency” demonstrates why that obsession is well-deserved.
The book provides a succinct but absorbing look at key moments in Kennedy’s time in office and provides a counterweight to some of the doorstopper biographies that have been published. Unlike some of those, Updegrove doesn’t aim for a sweeping history of every
moment in Kennedy’s life.
Updegrove focuses on the key moments of Kennedy’s presidency, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Civil Rights Movement. The years leading up Kennedy’s time in the White House take up less than a third of the book, but hardly feel brushed over.
Few people are in a better position to write about Kennedy’s life and legacy than Updegrove, the former head of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and ABC News’ presidential historian.
The book’s most dramatic sections are the ones focusing on Kennedy grappling with the Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union as well as the struggles over Civil Rights. Kennedy’s complicated relationship with Johnson, his unfaithful yet mythologized marriage to Jackie and his brother’s role in the presidency all are covered concisely, but none are given short shrift.
Updegrove provides a balanced look at Kennedy’s personal and political failings while offering a look at why a man who served just 1,036 days in office continues to rank so high by historians among the nation’s presidents.