Spreadsheets and Corpses: Optimization as Kitsch

1.

The most obscene gesture of our era is not violence but its opposite: the spreadsheet. We have learned to treat existence as a system awaiting optimization—sleep, sex, nutrition, grief, all reduced to variables in an equation whose solution is always more. The Points Guy does not merely accumulate miles; he performs a metaphysics. His life is a ledger where every experience must yield returns. This is not hedonism. This is bookkeeping with delusions of transcendence.

The rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.

Melchor's opening sentence refuses such accounting. The boys who discover the Witch's body are not optimizing anything. They are playing at war with a pail of rocks, carrying out some childish battle whose rules exist only in the moment of their invention. The corpse they find is not data. It does not fit into a productivity system. It smiles—a grotesque, uninterpretable sign that mocks the very notion of legibility. This is the violence that cannot be gamified.

2.

The optimization mindset depends on a particular Sensibility: the belief that transparency yields control. If we track our sleep cycles, our macros, our credit card points, we will somehow transcend the mess of embodiment. But Melchor's La Matosa operates under a different economy—an economy of the finite, where resources are scarcity itself and the body is not a machine to be tuned but a site of relentless vulnerability.

Consider the Witch. She performs abortions. She listens to women's "sniveling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives." These are not services that can be rated on a five-star scale. Her power is opaque, her methods unverified, her house a "shitty dump" where the floorboards themselves seem to rot with intention. The men who eventually murder her do so because they cannot tolerate this opacity. They need to believe she has hidden gold, that her power can be located, extracted, optimized into their own possession. They kill her for failing to be a spreadsheet.

3.

There is a Kitsch to optimization culture that deserves scrutiny. The Points Guy and his ilk sell a particular fantasy: that one can live richly while paying nothing, that luxury is merely a matter of algorithmic competence. This is Stylization without substance, the aesthetic of abundance stripped of its cost. The Instagram posts showing airport lounges and business class seats are symptoms of a deeper pathology—the belief that experience itself can be arbitraged.

Hookers and hussies ... the only women who... dared to visit the Witch at home, in that hovel hidden among the crops; who dared to rap on the door until the mad shrew, dressed head to toe in black, poked her head out from a half-open door.

Melchor's women do not optimize. They visit the Witch because they have no other options, because the official systems—medical, legal, social—have already failed them. Their visits are not about maximizing value but about survival in its most brute form. The "potions to pin down the men" are not life hacks. They are desperate measures in a world where desire itself is a weapon turned against women. There is no app for this. No points system rewards this labor.

4.

The Gaze of the optimizer is fundamentally parasitic. It looks at the world and sees only extractable value. Every meal is a macronutrient profile. Every friendship is a networking opportunity. Every destination is a check-in. This gaze cannot accommodate the Witch's canal, where the water carries both corpses and plastic bags with democratic indifference. The canal does not care about your morning routine. The hurricane does not respect your sleep hygiene.

Melchor's prose performs this resistance. Her sentences run on for pages, paragraph-less torrents that deny the reader any moment of comfortable extraction. You cannot skim this text for actionable insights. You cannot bullet-point its wisdom. It demands submission to its rhythm, its profanity, its relentless forward motion. This is Artificiality of a different order—not the curated artificiality of the optimized life, but the constructed density of literature that refuses to be useful.

5.

What the optimizer fears most is precisely what Melchor offers: the recognition that some experiences are not systems to be hacked but abysses to be witnessed. The murder of the Witch is not a problem to be solved. The novel reveals its perpetrators early; there is no mystery to unravel, no satisfying arc of justice. The violence simply is, accumulating like the humidity of Veracruz, inescapable and finally meaningless.

The Points Guy would not survive La Matosa. His spreadsheets would dissolve in the humidity. His credit cards would be worthless in a town where the only currency that matters is the favor of the local narcos, where the Oil Company's arrival has meant not opportunity but displacement, where the hurricane of 1978 still haunts the collective memory like a premonition of all future catastrophes.

The days pass by and Norma's pain and bleeding do not stop.

There is no optimization for this. No loyalty program rewards this loyalty—to pain, to bleeding, to the slow accumulation of damage that constitutes a life in Melchor's world. The novel's final gift is its refusal to redeem this suffering, to translate it into meaning. The corpse smiles. The canal carries everything away. The boys return to their game.

The spreadsheet remains blank.