hurricane season fernanda melchor review

Clearly she is saying something about the way violence trickles down from those in power. On the surface, it seems standard Mexploitation fare.

It is the anti-Coco, a world defined by the almost complete absence of tenderness.Īware of the controversy that greeted American Dirt and its apparently similarly lurid (and by many accounts appropriative) depiction of Mexico, I wonder what Melchor is up to here. Substance abuse, sex work, rape, abortion, witchcraft, paedophilia, bestiality, murder and torture in their most extreme forms, particularly of women – all are depicted matter-of-factly. This is a book that has not met a taboo that can’t be broken. It is a heightened world of poverty and violence – with the horrifying question mark looming over it that maybe it is not heightened at all.

Sophie Hughes has rendered every curse into florid and ribald English. It is riveting writing, and Melchor is running a very tight ship, picking up all the threads and weaving them together in an ending that, if not exactly warm and fuzzy, is very satisfying.

Their testimonies come pouring out in breathless sentences that go for paragraphs at a time, full of cursing, idiom, and folk nightmare. There’s his cousin Yesenia, his step-father Munra, his 13-year-old child-bride Norma, and his friend Brando. All are connected to a young man known as Luismi, usually found drugged to his eyeballs in the local park. The victim is a woman known only as the Witch, and the novel takes the form of a series of testimonies or confessionals from four characters who know something about why she was murdered. Drug cartels hold the ultimate power, corrupting everything – industry, police and politics. Oil companies have moved into the sugarcane lands, building highways enabling the movement of drugs and sex work. It is not so far in mode from gothic horror stories of the Australian bush, that great expanse that terrified settlers with its featurelessness full of folk monsters. Hurricane Season is set pretty much now in the village of La Matosa, which loosely translates as “the bush”. It’s a visceral way to open a book, but Hurricane Season, like the weather phenomena in its title, only gathers force and intensity as the book progresses, unleashing hell on earth. Coming to an irrigation ditch, they find a body in the water, blotted and rotting, its throat savaged and face writhing with black snakes. A group of boys walk down a riverside path between sugarcane fields on the steamy coastal plains of Mexico.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor review