Perhaps a morbid curiosity is what drives us to seek out strange books. Perhaps not morbid, but instead a fundamental curiosity towards ourselves as humans and the possibilities of experience. Maybe the bizarre helps us come to terms with the universality of human insecurity, acknowledging our own fears, our strangeness, or our fear of the strangeness of others. Like a niche band once said, “I’m a freak, I’m a weirdo.”
Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais and Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot share preoccupation with the taboo and a “paradise” not quite achieved.
Paradais is told through the lens of a working class 16-year-old Mexican boy. Melchor covers an astounding number of bases while managing to remain compelling; class struggle, digital corruption, systematic violence, sexual violence, toxic masculinity, and coming of age. Melchor steps into the niche of verisimilitude at some points, unafraid to describe the gore of real life, not just the gore of violence, but also of the sexual, and the disturbing. And trust me, it is disturbing.
That is why it is so powerful. One could describe it as a non-horror horror. Melchor tells us about the horror in Paradais’ perversely tangible world in plain terms. What makes it scary is that it is true.
Hval plunges headfirst into magical realism. Coming from a very different cultural landscape, she takes a darker, stranger approach to “reality”, or the lack thereof. This book feels like a dream; a dark, decaying, and bodily-centered dream from an exchange student beginning her studies at a fictional Welsh seaside university. Hval explores themes of identity and how it is lost. Probing the reader, at the gross and disturbing world of their own body and our connection with nature, Paradise Rot feels organic, paying homage to the power of the natural world. Ultimately, I believe Hval is talking about death and acceptance, focusing on the body and nature as a means of telling this, and my gosh is it all so strange.
Something about the subversive, dichotomously comforting, and disturbing world of the ‘weird’ remains just as attractive to the modern reader as it did 50 years ago. Weird writing is impossible to define empirically. From the gritty world of Paradais, to the surreal dreamscape of Paradise Rot, the current literary landscape – upheld by the liberality of Western publishers – enables new depth to be found in the domain of strange writing. Whether this will remain a positive thing when pushed to its logical extremes remains to be seen.
Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash
