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Hurricane Season
Inspired by a real event of the murder of a woman in rural Mexico, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with superstitions and violence—violence that poisons everything around.
The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing in the murky waters of the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village is rife with rumours and suspicions about the murder of this feared and respected woman, who had carried out the community’s ritual shamanic customs. In dazzling, visceral language, Melchor extracts humanity from otherwise irredeemably brutal characters, and spins a terrifying and heartrending tale of dark suspense in a Mexican village that seems damned.
Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. In 2018, she won the PEN Mexico Award for Literary and Journalistic Excellence and in 2019 the German Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season.
Sophie Hughes has translated works by a number of Spanish-language writers, including Enrique Vila-Matas, and Alia Trabucco Zerán.
‘Melchor wields a sentence like a saber. She never flinches in the bold, precise strokes of Hurricane Season. In prose as precise and breathtaking as it is unsettling, Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence everywhere.’ Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.’ Samanta Schweblin
177 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 12, 2017
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About the author
Fernanda Melchor
11 books4,428 followersNací en el puerto de Veracruz. Escribí el libro de crónicas Aquí no es Miami y las novelas Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Páradais.
I was born in Veracruz, Mexico. I wrote the non-fiction book Aquí no es Miami and the novels Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Paradais.
I was born in Veracruz, Mexico. I wrote the non-fiction book Aquí no es Miami and the novels Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Paradais.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 9,455 reviews
March 15, 2018
Nota real: 4.5 estrellas
Hace mucho que no sentía que un libro me asfixiaba, me calaba hasta los huesos y me incomodaba tanto como éste. "Temporada de Huracanes" es una historia que me desgarró el alma, sabiendo que lo que ocurre en sus páginas no está nada lejos de la realidad.
La forma en que está escrito contribuye a esa sensación incómoda, vertiginosa, como de agua que va subiendo y subiendo para ahogarte: oraciones largas, con pocos puntos y aparte, que hacen que la prosa se sienta como una retahíla de palabras que no deja de fluir y fluir y que cada vez se van poniendo más y más turbias.
Violencia, pobreza, adicciones, una terrible incomprensión y protagonistas que buscan amor y ser vistos en los lugares equivocados, todos con un terrible vacío. Cada capítulo se centra en un personaje distinto, pero a la vez, todos son pieza del mismo rompecabezas (que más que rompecabezas, se siente como un cadáver descuartizado).
Crees que ya sabes por donde va la historia de la bruja y de repente -por boca de otro personaje- te enteras de que no es así, lo mismo con Luismi, Norma, la Lagarta, Chabela, Munra y todos los personajes sórdidos de esta historia violenta que me dejó triste, incómoda, pero también fascinada con la capacidad de Fernanda Melchor para crear una especie de novela que es como un choque de autos: no quieres ver, pero el morbo te impide apartar la vista.
No puedo esperar para leer más de esta autora (pero primero voy a necesitar un par de libros que me devuelvan la fe en la humanidad, si no quiero caer en un hoyo negro existencial).
Hace mucho que no sentía que un libro me asfixiaba, me calaba hasta los huesos y me incomodaba tanto como éste. "Temporada de Huracanes" es una historia que me desgarró el alma, sabiendo que lo que ocurre en sus páginas no está nada lejos de la realidad.
La forma en que está escrito contribuye a esa sensación incómoda, vertiginosa, como de agua que va subiendo y subiendo para ahogarte: oraciones largas, con pocos puntos y aparte, que hacen que la prosa se sienta como una retahíla de palabras que no deja de fluir y fluir y que cada vez se van poniendo más y más turbias.
Violencia, pobreza, adicciones, una terrible incomprensión y protagonistas que buscan amor y ser vistos en los lugares equivocados, todos con un terrible vacío. Cada capítulo se centra en un personaje distinto, pero a la vez, todos son pieza del mismo rompecabezas (que más que rompecabezas, se siente como un cadáver descuartizado).
Crees que ya sabes por donde va la historia de la bruja y de repente -por boca de otro personaje- te enteras de que no es así, lo mismo con Luismi, Norma, la Lagarta, Chabela, Munra y todos los personajes sórdidos de esta historia violenta que me dejó triste, incómoda, pero también fascinada con la capacidad de Fernanda Melchor para crear una especie de novela que es como un choque de autos: no quieres ver, pero el morbo te impide apartar la vista.
No puedo esperar para leer más de esta autora (pero primero voy a necesitar un par de libros que me devuelvan la fe en la humanidad, si no quiero caer en un hoyo negro existencial).
September 21, 2023
My Book of the year 2020
Shortlisted for 2020 International Booker Prize
It’s violent, it’s grim, the language is dirty, the prose is intense, there is rape, abuse of minors, sex, drugs, murder, violence towards homosexuals, poverty, whores, lots of booze, too much of everything that should disgust me. However, I could not stop reading, I was in trance every time I opened my kindle, It was like I was the one on drugs not the characters. I had a heaviness in my chest while I was reading most of this short novel. A book that makes you feel so uncomfortable and unpleasant but also mesmerizes you and locks you in, deserves all the stars (and the Booker International prize as a bonus. ). From the 4 titles that I’ve read so far this is my favorite.
The novel is written around the brutal murder of a witch in a nightmarish village somewhere in Mexico. In each of the 8 chapters the story is told from the point of view of one character who has more or less something to do with the murder or knows a characters that was involved in the violence.
Ps.1 Here is an interview of the Author where she admits that she got inspired to write the novel from a real story read in a newspaper.
Shortlisted for 2020 International Booker Prize
It’s violent, it’s grim, the language is dirty, the prose is intense, there is rape, abuse of minors, sex, drugs, murder, violence towards homosexuals, poverty, whores, lots of booze, too much of everything that should disgust me. However, I could not stop reading, I was in trance every time I opened my kindle, It was like I was the one on drugs not the characters. I had a heaviness in my chest while I was reading most of this short novel. A book that makes you feel so uncomfortable and unpleasant but also mesmerizes you and locks you in, deserves all the stars (and the Booker International prize as a bonus. ). From the 4 titles that I’ve read so far this is my favorite.
The novel is written around the brutal murder of a witch in a nightmarish village somewhere in Mexico. In each of the 8 chapters the story is told from the point of view of one character who has more or less something to do with the murder or knows a characters that was involved in the violence.
Ps.1 Here is an interview of the Author where she admits that she got inspired to write the novel from a real story read in a newspaper.
December 29, 2021
Es este uno de los comentarios más incómodos que he escrito para una novela, y no solo porque la autora fuera tan amable de firmarme mi ejemplar, o porque la abrumadora unanimidad de la crítica me deje a mí en tan escasa compañía, o porque toda denuncia de la situación de las mujeres o los homosexuales, de cuya crítica no se libran ni ellos mismos, en un mundo estructuralmente pobre, violento, corrupto, machista, homófobo y supersticiosamente religioso o religiosamente supersticioso, sea siempre muy necesaria, sino también porque su estilo debería haberme gustado tanto como me gustó en otras obras con las que la autora se siente en deuda, como El otoño del Patriarca que ella misma menciona en sus agradecimientos.
Ninguna de esas razones de mi desencuentro son, por supuesto, el lenguaje soez, apropiado al tipo de personajes que protagonizan el relato, ni las numerosas escenas de sexo, muchas veces brutal y alguna vez quizá algo gratuita, ni los muchos modismos locales que, sin entenderlos explícitamente, se intuyen perfectamente en el contexto dotando a la narración de una musicalidad que quizás apreciemos más los no acostumbrados a tales formas. Tampoco soy de esos lectores a los que les repele la brutalidad de la sociedad que la autora describe ni que saque a la luz sus muchas lacras: pedofilia, travestismo, prostitución, narcotráfico…
Y así sigo, quebrándome la cabeza para descubrir las razones de mi desapego con la obra. Bien pudiera ser que todos esos factores, en principio positivos, hayan intensificado, por contraste, la frialdad que me ha transmitido la novela, como si todo el esfuerzo estilístico que ha realizado la autora hubiera sido inútil para encajarlos debidamente, quedando todo excesivamente desequilibrado hacia unos personajes carentes de contrapunto a tanta abyección, sin las aristas y planos diversos que los dotara de volumen y, en cierto sentido, de humanidad. Será por eso que, aunque tengo la seguridad de que nada de lo que describe es exagerado, no me ha sonado a verdad.
June 13, 2020
That was so far removed from my comfort zone, I now need to watch the Disney channel for a month.
January 8, 2018
Pasan los dias, y sigo pensando en esta historia terrible y terrorífica, como la realidad misma, esta realidad que vivimos en México. Melchor escribe endemoniadamente bien.
Tengo mis categorías para algunas escritoras jóvenes, y a Melchor la pondría dentro de "chicas siniestras", onda mariana Enriquez, o Samantha shweblin, por esas historias en donde hay brujas, y algo medio en el borde del suspenso. Melchor se la avienta a la Mexicana, y nadie se salva. Es una maravilla, sus elementos son muy intensos, la historia es terrible, pero me atrapó desde el principio. Hacía tiempo que no leía a una escritora mexicana joven, que me gustara tanto. Parece que tiene otra novela, la buscaré, y esta les pido encarecidamente que la lean.
Tengo mis categorías para algunas escritoras jóvenes, y a Melchor la pondría dentro de "chicas siniestras", onda mariana Enriquez, o Samantha shweblin, por esas historias en donde hay brujas, y algo medio en el borde del suspenso. Melchor se la avienta a la Mexicana, y nadie se salva. Es una maravilla, sus elementos son muy intensos, la historia es terrible, pero me atrapó desde el principio. Hacía tiempo que no leía a una escritora mexicana joven, que me gustara tanto. Parece que tiene otra novela, la buscaré, y esta les pido encarecidamente que la lean.
June 11, 2019
Este es un libro de esos que termino y pienso: ¿qué acabo de leer?
O bueno, de escuchar, porque lo escuché en audiolibro y ufff, Daniela Aedo, la narradora, se lleva todos mis aplausos.
No sé qué decir todavía. Ni tampoco sé si mi calificación se va a quedar así o va a bajar o va a subir, tengo que digerir todo. Pero sí les puedo decir que es un libro que me atrapó de principio a fin, me era muy difícil despegarme del audiolibro cada vez que tenía cosas qué hacer.
También debo decir que es un libro fuerte. Muy fuerte.
Tal vez luego complete mis comentarios por aquí, pero si no, ya saben que hablaré de este libro en el wrap up correspondiente.
O bueno, de escuchar, porque lo escuché en audiolibro y ufff, Daniela Aedo, la narradora, se lleva todos mis aplausos.
No sé qué decir todavía. Ni tampoco sé si mi calificación se va a quedar así o va a bajar o va a subir, tengo que digerir todo. Pero sí les puedo decir que es un libro que me atrapó de principio a fin, me era muy difícil despegarme del audiolibro cada vez que tenía cosas qué hacer.
También debo decir que es un libro fuerte. Muy fuerte.
Tal vez luego complete mis comentarios por aquí, pero si no, ya saben que hablaré de este libro en el wrap up correspondiente.
June 24, 2020
4.5 stars
“They say the heat’s driven the locals crazy, that it’s not normal — May and not a single drop of rain — and that the hurricane season’s coming hard, that it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all that bleakness: decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled-up, bagged-up bodies dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town.”
It is so often the children who suffer the consequences of poverty and a corrupt system. And these are the characters my heart bled for, because that’s really what they are… just children. Children that have been thrust into adulthood too quickly, children that have been abused, children whose parents have forsaken them due to their own miserable lives. And we all know that not only does misery love company, misery begets more misery.
The novel begins with the discovery of a body in the canal – the body of one that is called Witch. The witch has suffered a gruesome death, and from the beginning I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged through the hopeless and merciless streets of a small Mexican rural town. I was consumed by the tempest until I was finally disgorged at the graveside, gasping for breath. It’s savage, tragic, and violently graphic. I couldn’t set it down.
“… La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho…”
A deadly hurricane had changed not just the landscape of this town, but the lives of the people as well. A town already gripped by superstition and the plagues of poverty is thrust further into the depths of its fears. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and acts of violence are perpetuated by a degenerate patriarchal system, a crooked police force, and the ruthless drug lords. Children are exploited, forced to care for their siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents. They in turn are caught in the whirlwind and beaten down, turning to booze, weed, pills, and sex (in all of its myriad variations) to combat their loneliness and helplessness.
“… there was something evil and terrible inside her for wanting that contact, that crude embrace, and for wanting it to last forever…”
The structure of this novel is skilled and very effective at moving the plot forward. Each chapter has a different voice. Each is told from the perspective of a character either involved in the murder, a witness to that murder, or someone who has been in close proximity to one of the perpetrators of this vicious crime. Motives for the murder are revealed. In the process the reader is subjected to sexually explicit violence, perversions, and obscenities. None of it ever felt gratuitous, however, and for this I applaud Fernanda Melchor. Stark realism is never obstructed by cheap melodrama.
This book is cheerless, uncomfortable, and fierce; yet I highly recommend it for anyone that has even the slightest curiosity about it. I felt I was given a grim but authentic portrait of a culture that is steeped in the darkest of torments. Is it possible that only in death is one truly freed from the trials of human suffering? If you are easily offended or faint-of-heart, then perhaps you will want to steer clear of this one. On my part, I can say that it is a riveting, remarkable piece of writing, and I hope that we will see more of Melchor’s work in translation very soon.
“They say the heat’s driven the locals crazy, that it’s not normal — May and not a single drop of rain — and that the hurricane season’s coming hard, that it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all that bleakness: decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled-up, bagged-up bodies dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town.”
It is so often the children who suffer the consequences of poverty and a corrupt system. And these are the characters my heart bled for, because that’s really what they are… just children. Children that have been thrust into adulthood too quickly, children that have been abused, children whose parents have forsaken them due to their own miserable lives. And we all know that not only does misery love company, misery begets more misery.
The novel begins with the discovery of a body in the canal – the body of one that is called Witch. The witch has suffered a gruesome death, and from the beginning I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged through the hopeless and merciless streets of a small Mexican rural town. I was consumed by the tempest until I was finally disgorged at the graveside, gasping for breath. It’s savage, tragic, and violently graphic. I couldn’t set it down.
“… La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho…”
A deadly hurricane had changed not just the landscape of this town, but the lives of the people as well. A town already gripped by superstition and the plagues of poverty is thrust further into the depths of its fears. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and acts of violence are perpetuated by a degenerate patriarchal system, a crooked police force, and the ruthless drug lords. Children are exploited, forced to care for their siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents. They in turn are caught in the whirlwind and beaten down, turning to booze, weed, pills, and sex (in all of its myriad variations) to combat their loneliness and helplessness.
“… there was something evil and terrible inside her for wanting that contact, that crude embrace, and for wanting it to last forever…”
The structure of this novel is skilled and very effective at moving the plot forward. Each chapter has a different voice. Each is told from the perspective of a character either involved in the murder, a witness to that murder, or someone who has been in close proximity to one of the perpetrators of this vicious crime. Motives for the murder are revealed. In the process the reader is subjected to sexually explicit violence, perversions, and obscenities. None of it ever felt gratuitous, however, and for this I applaud Fernanda Melchor. Stark realism is never obstructed by cheap melodrama.
This book is cheerless, uncomfortable, and fierce; yet I highly recommend it for anyone that has even the slightest curiosity about it. I felt I was given a grim but authentic portrait of a culture that is steeped in the darkest of torments. Is it possible that only in death is one truly freed from the trials of human suffering? If you are easily offended or faint-of-heart, then perhaps you will want to steer clear of this one. On my part, I can say that it is a riveting, remarkable piece of writing, and I hope that we will see more of Melchor’s work in translation very soon.
Read
October 22, 2022What I admired most about this impressive book was the structure.
It is composed of eight chapters, the first and the last very calm in tone, as if winding the story up and then winding it back down, in contrast to the hectic pace of the other six chapters which are each like a vortex of words, tumbling one upon another in a circular way that winds up from the beginning and winds down at the end, like a mini version of the larger book the chapter is part of.
Each of those six chapters is told from the point of view of a different character and the narratives read like a series of short stories about various people who live in one particular village in Mexico, but as we read on, each chapter offers clues to some of the mysteries in the chapters that came before, but very subtly so that you have to pay attention or you'll miss the piece of the puzzle buried in each chapter.
The challenge of paying attention is made difficult by the furious pace of the narrative voices which makes the reader hurtle through their narratives at the speed of a hurricane.
I looked up hurricanes in Mexico and it seems there's a hurricane season which lasts about six months so the six furious chapters might correspond to those six months which in any case are bookended by hurricanes.
A hurricane itself has a five-part structure with the eye of the storm in the centre. The six chapters each had an 'eye' too, a central event around which it revolved.
So there you have it. Fernanda Melchor has created a novel with a structure that perfectly matches its manic content, its violent themes and its menacing title.
It is composed of eight chapters, the first and the last very calm in tone, as if winding the story up and then winding it back down, in contrast to the hectic pace of the other six chapters which are each like a vortex of words, tumbling one upon another in a circular way that winds up from the beginning and winds down at the end, like a mini version of the larger book the chapter is part of.
Each of those six chapters is told from the point of view of a different character and the narratives read like a series of short stories about various people who live in one particular village in Mexico, but as we read on, each chapter offers clues to some of the mysteries in the chapters that came before, but very subtly so that you have to pay attention or you'll miss the piece of the puzzle buried in each chapter.
The challenge of paying attention is made difficult by the furious pace of the narrative voices which makes the reader hurtle through their narratives at the speed of a hurricane.
I looked up hurricanes in Mexico and it seems there's a hurricane season which lasts about six months so the six furious chapters might correspond to those six months which in any case are bookended by hurricanes.
A hurricane itself has a five-part structure with the eye of the storm in the centre. The six chapters each had an 'eye' too, a central event around which it revolved.
So there you have it. Fernanda Melchor has created a novel with a structure that perfectly matches its manic content, its violent themes and its menacing title.
April 15, 2020
La Melchor lo vuelve a hacer: escribe un libro magistral que te toma de las entrañas y no te suelta hasta que lo terminas. Incluso, una vez que llegas al final de la página 222, sientes que el aire se ha vuelto más denso, pero que ha ganado claridad. Sientes que el mundo que te rodea se ha pulido un poco, y no es que lo veas más limpio, sino que ha ganado lucidez, mostrando la podredumbre de nuestras instituciones, de nuestras autoridades, de la “civilización” en que nos hemos convertido.
Ya desde que leyera Aquí no es Miami me quedó muy claro el tamaño inmenso de escritora que es Fernanda, y a pesar de que tengo pendiente su “Falsa liebre”, no dudo ni por un segundo que será otra novela extraordinaria.
En Temporada de huracanes Melchor me recuerda aquella consigna que le leí al Philip K. Dick al final del primer tomo de sus relatos, donde afirmaba que le gustaba darle voz a los que no la tienen. Muchos de los personajes de Temporada pertenecen a esos 53 millones 418 mil 151 personas en situación de pobreza en México. Personas que sí tienen voz, pero que nadie escucha.
Novela coral, donde el tono, el ritmo y lenguaje de quienes hablan se respeta, pero en donde la rabia de la autora no se puede ocultar. El coraje, el desgarro de una escritora que reconoce que hay situaciones muy jodidas en nuestro país, abusos, injusticias, desigualdad y una impunidad que no se puede asir por ninguno de sus lados, incluso de aquellos descaradamente visibles.
Había comenzado a leer la novela hace meses, cuando recién salió, pero no tuve oportunidad de terminarla. La retomé el domingo pasado y la devoré de un día a otro, así, como un huracán, es como debiera leerse este libro: abrirlo y pasar sus hojas leyendo a conciencia, sintiendo como se desordena todo a tu alrededor, como algunas cosas vuelan, como hay espacios de calma, pero en donde no estás tranquilo, puesto que sabes que es momentáneo. Que no perdurará.
Al final, podríamos concluir que llevamos años en una temporada eterna de huracanes, donde la paz que creemos ver puede ser el ojo del huracán pasando exactamente sobre nuestras cabezas, ya que, no porque no veamos que haya catástrofes a nuestro alrededor no significa que en la periferia del huracán se esté cargando la chingada a muchas personas.
Eso pasó con el narco.
Eso pasa a diario con los políticos.
Eso pasa cada que nos sumamos a la corrupción. Que dejamos pasar un delito por alto. Que no nos levantamos de nuestras poltronas donde leemos a gusto una novela porque alguien más saldrá a las calles a reclamar lo nuestro. Lo de todos. Lo de nadie. Porque en el fondo somos unos cobardes que no queremos perder lo que tenemos a la mano. Lo seguro. Sin darnos cuenta que estos esfuerzos bravos como la novela de Melchor, requieren que nos sumemos al grito de basta. Que levantemos la voz por nosotros y los nuestros.
Por último, podemos contar con que la trinchera de la literatura está bien resguardada por escritoras como Fernanda Melchor. Enhorabuena, y que sigan llegando novelotas como esta.
Ya desde que leyera Aquí no es Miami me quedó muy claro el tamaño inmenso de escritora que es Fernanda, y a pesar de que tengo pendiente su “Falsa liebre”, no dudo ni por un segundo que será otra novela extraordinaria.
En Temporada de huracanes Melchor me recuerda aquella consigna que le leí al Philip K. Dick al final del primer tomo de sus relatos, donde afirmaba que le gustaba darle voz a los que no la tienen. Muchos de los personajes de Temporada pertenecen a esos 53 millones 418 mil 151 personas en situación de pobreza en México. Personas que sí tienen voz, pero que nadie escucha.
Novela coral, donde el tono, el ritmo y lenguaje de quienes hablan se respeta, pero en donde la rabia de la autora no se puede ocultar. El coraje, el desgarro de una escritora que reconoce que hay situaciones muy jodidas en nuestro país, abusos, injusticias, desigualdad y una impunidad que no se puede asir por ninguno de sus lados, incluso de aquellos descaradamente visibles.
Había comenzado a leer la novela hace meses, cuando recién salió, pero no tuve oportunidad de terminarla. La retomé el domingo pasado y la devoré de un día a otro, así, como un huracán, es como debiera leerse este libro: abrirlo y pasar sus hojas leyendo a conciencia, sintiendo como se desordena todo a tu alrededor, como algunas cosas vuelan, como hay espacios de calma, pero en donde no estás tranquilo, puesto que sabes que es momentáneo. Que no perdurará.
Al final, podríamos concluir que llevamos años en una temporada eterna de huracanes, donde la paz que creemos ver puede ser el ojo del huracán pasando exactamente sobre nuestras cabezas, ya que, no porque no veamos que haya catástrofes a nuestro alrededor no significa que en la periferia del huracán se esté cargando la chingada a muchas personas.
Eso pasó con el narco.
Eso pasa a diario con los políticos.
Eso pasa cada que nos sumamos a la corrupción. Que dejamos pasar un delito por alto. Que no nos levantamos de nuestras poltronas donde leemos a gusto una novela porque alguien más saldrá a las calles a reclamar lo nuestro. Lo de todos. Lo de nadie. Porque en el fondo somos unos cobardes que no queremos perder lo que tenemos a la mano. Lo seguro. Sin darnos cuenta que estos esfuerzos bravos como la novela de Melchor, requieren que nos sumemos al grito de basta. Que levantemos la voz por nosotros y los nuestros.
Por último, podemos contar con que la trinchera de la literatura está bien resguardada por escritoras como Fernanda Melchor. Enhorabuena, y que sigan llegando novelotas como esta.
February 27, 2020
From my review in the Irish Times:
Fernanda Melchor’s first novel to appear in English is an insane wall of text, a phalanx of prose rallied between the margins with strict orders to destroy the reader. Hurricane Season is the story of the Witch and her power over the inhabitants of the Mexican village of La Matosa. Melchor’s extremely graphic prose throughout would have Georges Bataille himself reaching for a crucifix but it is a commendation of translator Sophie Hughes that the novel never reads like cheap smut. It is often beautiful, often harrowing, and deeply affecting while . Almost instantly hailed as a modern classic of Mexican literature upon its publication, Hurricane Season can finally unleash its torrent upon English-language readers. Quite the apt title.
Fernanda Melchor’s first novel to appear in English is an insane wall of text, a phalanx of prose rallied between the margins with strict orders to destroy the reader. Hurricane Season is the story of the Witch and her power over the inhabitants of the Mexican village of La Matosa. Melchor’s extremely graphic prose throughout would have Georges Bataille himself reaching for a crucifix but it is a commendation of translator Sophie Hughes that the novel never reads like cheap smut. It is often beautiful, often harrowing, and deeply affecting while . Almost instantly hailed as a modern classic of Mexican literature upon its publication, Hurricane Season can finally unleash its torrent upon English-language readers. Quite the apt title.
June 25, 2025
One Big Multi-Layered Orgy...
HURRICANE SEASON
by Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes
4 1/2 stars. This story isn't for everybody. I'm going to start off with the warnings: graphic sex and violence on almost every page, and rampant profanity...
The story begins with...
The dead body of a small town's witch discovered floating in an irrigation canal in Mexico...
The story then digresses...
We are given several accounts about what led up to the witch's murder and about the witch itself...
The accounts are brutally direct and unflinching, which can leave some readers feeling abused and beaten up themselves...
If you find yourself slowing to view a bad traffic accident, you'll probably find this a good read because it allows the reader to view the most intimate and gut-wrenching details...
To concisely describe this novel...
It was like reading about one big multi-layered orgy of every variety...
And then some...
Some readers may not like the author's style of using long, loooooooooooong sentences spanning an entire chapter without punctuation or paragraphs and focusing on a featured character's POV.
I removed half a star due to the avalanche of non-stop profanity, which had my psyche begging for relief. There is every kind of sexual situation imaginable, but if you can take the content, the story is very thought-provoking.
Read this story to understand why the witch had to die (and who's zoomin' who).
Warning to some readers: rampant profanity, graphic violence, explicit sexual content, rape, pedophilia, bestiality, and some racism
HURRICANE SEASON
by Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes
4 1/2 stars. This story isn't for everybody. I'm going to start off with the warnings: graphic sex and violence on almost every page, and rampant profanity...
The story begins with...
The dead body of a small town's witch discovered floating in an irrigation canal in Mexico...
The story then digresses...
We are given several accounts about what led up to the witch's murder and about the witch itself...
The accounts are brutally direct and unflinching, which can leave some readers feeling abused and beaten up themselves...
If you find yourself slowing to view a bad traffic accident, you'll probably find this a good read because it allows the reader to view the most intimate and gut-wrenching details...
To concisely describe this novel...
It was like reading about one big multi-layered orgy of every variety...
And then some...
Some readers may not like the author's style of using long, loooooooooooong sentences spanning an entire chapter without punctuation or paragraphs and focusing on a featured character's POV.
I removed half a star due to the avalanche of non-stop profanity, which had my psyche begging for relief. There is every kind of sexual situation imaginable, but if you can take the content, the story is very thought-provoking.
Read this story to understand why the witch had to die (and who's zoomin' who).
Warning to some readers: rampant profanity, graphic violence, explicit sexual content, rape, pedophilia, bestiality, and some racism
June 25, 2020
Hurricane Season is a portrait of a Mexican town crushed by violence, poverty, trauma, and degradation. It is an oppressive, suffocating, headlong rush of a novel.
The murder of the town ‘witch’ is at the eye of this maelstrom, written in dizzying, long, run-on sentences and whorls of revolving narrative. This style gives the novel its breathless, exhilarating pace: a ‘hurricane’ of words.
The crime is a pretext for examining the tangential lives of the townspeople. Each chapter begins in media res with a different character, details their history of hurt, then circles back to where the chapter began. It is a litany of extreme poverty, abuse, subjugation of every kind; of marginalised, abandoned and forgotten people engaging in the self-obliteration that is their only recourse.
While impressive, the novel—for me—was not a complete success. My criticisms are a bit paltry in the face of this book’s intensity and fierce motives, but I will state them anyway. The characters were not well individuated—Melchor depicts these people mainly as vehicles for trauma, the sum-total of their circumstances. Their unresolved fates make the book feel unfinished, rather than seeming like a meaningful choice. And while the writing (and translation) is brilliant, there were occasional misfires, for instance: “he yowled like the dogs that drag themselves, run-over but still breathing, to the roadside”. It’s a book full of nightmarish realism; in this scene where a man won’t stop screaming, appending a nightmarish simile felt like overkill to me.
It’s an accomplishment regardless, a brutal story that needed telling. Melchor has an urgent voice, intense and powerful, and I hope to see more of her work in English translation.
The murder of the town ‘witch’ is at the eye of this maelstrom, written in dizzying, long, run-on sentences and whorls of revolving narrative. This style gives the novel its breathless, exhilarating pace: a ‘hurricane’ of words.
The crime is a pretext for examining the tangential lives of the townspeople. Each chapter begins in media res with a different character, details their history of hurt, then circles back to where the chapter began. It is a litany of extreme poverty, abuse, subjugation of every kind; of marginalised, abandoned and forgotten people engaging in the self-obliteration that is their only recourse.
While impressive, the novel—for me—was not a complete success. My criticisms are a bit paltry in the face of this book’s intensity and fierce motives, but I will state them anyway. The characters were not well individuated—Melchor depicts these people mainly as vehicles for trauma, the sum-total of their circumstances. Their unresolved fates make the book feel unfinished, rather than seeming like a meaningful choice. And while the writing (and translation) is brilliant, there were occasional misfires, for instance: “he yowled like the dogs that drag themselves, run-over but still breathing, to the roadside”. It’s a book full of nightmarish realism; in this scene where a man won’t stop screaming, appending a nightmarish simile felt like overkill to me.
It’s an accomplishment regardless, a brutal story that needed telling. Melchor has an urgent voice, intense and powerful, and I hope to see more of her work in English translation.
September 20, 2025
They say she never really died, because witches don’t go without a fight. They say that, at the last minute, just before those kids stabbed her, she transformed into something else: a lizard or a rabbit, which scurried away and took cover in the heart of the bush. Or into the giant raptor that appeared in the sky in the days following the murder.
Hurricane Season ~~~ Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season was suggested to me by my friend Dani. Knowing my love for Roberto Bolaño, Dani thought I would enjoy this read; he was right. I did get off to a rough start with this one, but in the end, Melchor’s writing won me over.
At its core, Hurricane Season is a murder mystery; one that's told through the thoughts and voices of the inhabitants of a small village, La Matosa. Hurricane Season exposes the shattered dreams of a community hit by widespread violence, drug addiction, sexual abuse and financial hardships. Melchor is strongly influenced by Spillane, Capote, Bolaño and García Márquez among other writers here to create a masterful novel that is ultimately written in her own voice ~~ and what a powerful voice it is.
Hurricane Season tells the tales of a cast of characters, whose collective testimonies discuss the murder of the Witch. Her corpse is discovered in a canal on the opening page by five boys who see her face as she floats dead in a body of water. The novel’s timeline alternates between perspectives which tell the reader who the Witch was and why she was murdered. These perspectives gradually come together to produce overwhelming discord ~~ shedding more darkness than light on what has taken place. Melchor masterfully captures, the sexual abuse committed by men and the ways in which they also abuse one another.
Witchcraft, here, serves as a way to mythologize the forces that justify violence. The Witch ~~ whose gender and sexuality change depending upon who is speaking about her ~~ becomes the focal point of the town’s wants and desires. The Witch is both savior and devil in La Matosa.
To the men of La Matosa ~~ the same men who attend the orgies the Witch hosts ~~ she is the devil. It is widely believed that the Witch’s mother and Satin fucked to bring her forth into the world. In reality, the Witch is conceived by an attack on her mother when she is raped by several men.
Melchor explores toxic masculinity and the everyday sins it condones ~~ but Melchor takes this a step further ~~ she shows the reader how toxic masculinity not only effects women, but also how it traps and destroys men as well.
Here, homosexual desires are widespread yet stifled or justified through twisted reasoning ~~ by closing your eyes and pretending you’re with a woman, or getting a few beers ~~ Man, don’t tell me you’ve never been sucked off by a fag … they give you the head of your life and then pay you for the pleasure and buy you as many drinks as you like after.
In Melchor’s world, homophobia, misogyny, and poverty create the hurricane of violence.
And yet, in the end, Hurricane Season is not just about violence, but also survival. How do we survive when there are no Witches around, when there are no spells being cast to save us? How do we exist in a world where love and affection do not exist?
Hurricane Season ~~~ Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season was suggested to me by my friend Dani. Knowing my love for Roberto Bolaño, Dani thought I would enjoy this read; he was right. I did get off to a rough start with this one, but in the end, Melchor’s writing won me over.
At its core, Hurricane Season is a murder mystery; one that's told through the thoughts and voices of the inhabitants of a small village, La Matosa. Hurricane Season exposes the shattered dreams of a community hit by widespread violence, drug addiction, sexual abuse and financial hardships. Melchor is strongly influenced by Spillane, Capote, Bolaño and García Márquez among other writers here to create a masterful novel that is ultimately written in her own voice ~~ and what a powerful voice it is.
Hurricane Season tells the tales of a cast of characters, whose collective testimonies discuss the murder of the Witch. Her corpse is discovered in a canal on the opening page by five boys who see her face as she floats dead in a body of water. The novel’s timeline alternates between perspectives which tell the reader who the Witch was and why she was murdered. These perspectives gradually come together to produce overwhelming discord ~~ shedding more darkness than light on what has taken place. Melchor masterfully captures, the sexual abuse committed by men and the ways in which they also abuse one another.
Witchcraft, here, serves as a way to mythologize the forces that justify violence. The Witch ~~ whose gender and sexuality change depending upon who is speaking about her ~~ becomes the focal point of the town’s wants and desires. The Witch is both savior and devil in La Matosa.
To the men of La Matosa ~~ the same men who attend the orgies the Witch hosts ~~ she is the devil. It is widely believed that the Witch’s mother and Satin fucked to bring her forth into the world. In reality, the Witch is conceived by an attack on her mother when she is raped by several men.
Melchor explores toxic masculinity and the everyday sins it condones ~~ but Melchor takes this a step further ~~ she shows the reader how toxic masculinity not only effects women, but also how it traps and destroys men as well.
Here, homosexual desires are widespread yet stifled or justified through twisted reasoning ~~ by closing your eyes and pretending you’re with a woman, or getting a few beers ~~ Man, don’t tell me you’ve never been sucked off by a fag … they give you the head of your life and then pay you for the pleasure and buy you as many drinks as you like after.
In Melchor’s world, homophobia, misogyny, and poverty create the hurricane of violence.
And yet, in the end, Hurricane Season is not just about violence, but also survival. How do we survive when there are no Witches around, when there are no spells being cast to save us? How do we exist in a world where love and affection do not exist?
August 22, 2021
¿Qué se puede decir de esta poderosa novela de Fernanda Melchor? Es un viaje al corazón de la oscuridad, es literatura cruel con el lector, que no hace concesiones, que te hace nadar en una especie de lago de petróleo denso y te encoge el alma. Los críticos señalan múltiples influencias: Rulfo, Faulkner y García Márquez entre otros muchos, pero a mí me ha recordado a A sangre fría de Truman Capote, por lo que tiene de crudo relato periodístico que abunda en detalles escalofriantes.
Todo esto a través de las voces de unos personajes que nos van dando su propia versión de los hechos que han rodeado la muerte de la Bruja y que nos hacen una inmersión en el español de Méjico y en la jerga particular de cada uno de ellos. El gran trabajo lingüístico de Fernanda da credibilidad a la narración. Y nos mete de lleno en un paisaje de pobreza, drogas, abusos, marginación, toda la miseria que puede acumular un grupo humano parece estar ahí.
Y aquí vienen algunas de mis objeciones a esta que muchos consideran obra maestra, y no seré yo quien diga lo contrario. Es tan oscuro y desesperante el panorama que nos pinta la autora que al final nos deja una cierta sensación de indiferencia – las escenas son golpes tan seguidos que nos conducen a una especie de insensibilidad. Creo que a nivel literario puede ser mucho más conmovedor el equivalente a un codazo o un pellizco que cien puñetazos seguidos; estoy segura que si Fernanda logra reconducir toda esa energía puede producir obras magníficas.
Las relaciones sexuales son fuente de horror y ocupan gran parte de la narración: escenas detalladas de abusos a menores, bestialismo, pornografía, masturbación, prostitución, homosexualidad encubierta… no falta nada, todo ello regado con un exceso de fluidos corporales. Creo que hay una falta de medida, un exceso. Y sí, hay personajes que buscan el amor y atraen por un momento nuestra atención pero todo naufraga rápidamente en un caos de violencia y abuso.
Me gustaron más las historias de Aquí no es Miami, donde la variedad de ambientes reflejada constituía un retrato interesante de los claroscuros de Veracruz, con algunos momentos luminosos y mágicos y un humor tierno. Aquí no hay humor, no hay esoterismo, casi diría que hasta la crítica social queda sepultada en un alud de descripciones sórdidas que nos desborda.
Supongo que es mi visión personal, a mí me gusta mucho cómo escriben las otras ‘chicas tremendas’ de su generación, como Mariana Enríquez o Samanta Schweblin, porque te dan un respiro. Eso sí, Fernanda destaca entre todas y todos, alza su voz alta y clara, y lo de ‘tremenda’ se queda muy corto para ella.
En resumen, buena literatura, sí, pero no buena/agradable lectura (para mí).
Todo esto a través de las voces de unos personajes que nos van dando su propia versión de los hechos que han rodeado la muerte de la Bruja y que nos hacen una inmersión en el español de Méjico y en la jerga particular de cada uno de ellos. El gran trabajo lingüístico de Fernanda da credibilidad a la narración. Y nos mete de lleno en un paisaje de pobreza, drogas, abusos, marginación, toda la miseria que puede acumular un grupo humano parece estar ahí.
Y aquí vienen algunas de mis objeciones a esta que muchos consideran obra maestra, y no seré yo quien diga lo contrario. Es tan oscuro y desesperante el panorama que nos pinta la autora que al final nos deja una cierta sensación de indiferencia – las escenas son golpes tan seguidos que nos conducen a una especie de insensibilidad. Creo que a nivel literario puede ser mucho más conmovedor el equivalente a un codazo o un pellizco que cien puñetazos seguidos; estoy segura que si Fernanda logra reconducir toda esa energía puede producir obras magníficas.
Las relaciones sexuales son fuente de horror y ocupan gran parte de la narración: escenas detalladas de abusos a menores, bestialismo, pornografía, masturbación, prostitución, homosexualidad encubierta… no falta nada, todo ello regado con un exceso de fluidos corporales. Creo que hay una falta de medida, un exceso. Y sí, hay personajes que buscan el amor y atraen por un momento nuestra atención pero todo naufraga rápidamente en un caos de violencia y abuso.
Me gustaron más las historias de Aquí no es Miami, donde la variedad de ambientes reflejada constituía un retrato interesante de los claroscuros de Veracruz, con algunos momentos luminosos y mágicos y un humor tierno. Aquí no hay humor, no hay esoterismo, casi diría que hasta la crítica social queda sepultada en un alud de descripciones sórdidas que nos desborda.
Supongo que es mi visión personal, a mí me gusta mucho cómo escriben las otras ‘chicas tremendas’ de su generación, como Mariana Enríquez o Samanta Schweblin, porque te dan un respiro. Eso sí, Fernanda destaca entre todas y todos, alza su voz alta y clara, y lo de ‘tremenda’ se queda muy corto para ella.
En resumen, buena literatura, sí, pero no buena/agradable lectura (para mí).
August 12, 2020
3.5, rounded down.
This is a difficult one for me to rate and talk about - it's one that I could 'appreciate' and admire, rather than enjoy - the closest equivalent I can compare it to is the films of Tarantino - while I can see the artistry involved, I just don't much LIKE them. The story is compelling and involving, but also relentlessly unpleasant, violent and ugly ... and at several points is downright nauseating.
What worked for me is the quick pace and how the story evolved elliptically - each chapter is told from a different perspective, and things that are initially opaque or confusing are circled around to later on, and then suddenly make sense. The whole milieu of the seedy town and the downtrodden characters is strongly evoked, and gave me a sense of a place to which I would never otherwise be exposed (thankfully).
What didn't work so well, other than the aforementioned grotesquerie, is the fact that each chapter, some running 50+ pages, is composed of a single paragraph, even though topics are changed frequently and dialogue is sometimes involved, and sentences can also often stretch for several pages - this increasingly seems to be a modern fad that I devoutly wish would cease immediately. I hate having to get halfway through a sentence, lose my way because it becomes so convoluted, and have to backtrack repeatedly. Also, the unrelenting homo/transphobia on virtually every page grated ... necessary, perhaps, to tell the story, but also dispiriting to this queer reader.
Not exactly sorry I read it, and it seems to be a favorite to win the International Booker this year - since I haven't read any of the others, I can't really judge, but I would hope that there is another book in the shortlist that shows a better side of humanity.
This is a difficult one for me to rate and talk about - it's one that I could 'appreciate' and admire, rather than enjoy - the closest equivalent I can compare it to is the films of Tarantino - while I can see the artistry involved, I just don't much LIKE them. The story is compelling and involving, but also relentlessly unpleasant, violent and ugly ... and at several points is downright nauseating.
What worked for me is the quick pace and how the story evolved elliptically - each chapter is told from a different perspective, and things that are initially opaque or confusing are circled around to later on, and then suddenly make sense. The whole milieu of the seedy town and the downtrodden characters is strongly evoked, and gave me a sense of a place to which I would never otherwise be exposed (thankfully).
What didn't work so well, other than the aforementioned grotesquerie, is the fact that each chapter, some running 50+ pages, is composed of a single paragraph, even though topics are changed frequently and dialogue is sometimes involved, and sentences can also often stretch for several pages - this increasingly seems to be a modern fad that I devoutly wish would cease immediately. I hate having to get halfway through a sentence, lose my way because it becomes so convoluted, and have to backtrack repeatedly. Also, the unrelenting homo/transphobia on virtually every page grated ... necessary, perhaps, to tell the story, but also dispiriting to this queer reader.
Not exactly sorry I read it, and it seems to be a favorite to win the International Booker this year - since I haven't read any of the others, I can't really judge, but I would hope that there is another book in the shortlist that shows a better side of humanity.
December 27, 2020
FINAL REVIEW: AAAAH. The punchy prose and frenetic energy of Hurricane Season reminded me of three novels: 2666, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Milkman. 2666: because of its panoramic depiction of the socio-economic violence in contemporary Mexico, especially the tendency towards femicide. Seven Killings: because of the unapologetic use of animated and arresting language, not giving a damn if the reader can catch up. You’re a prisoner, you can’t look away from the horrific imagery, and it sweeps you up for the ride of your life. Similarly to Milkman, this book goes back and forth on colorful tangents, bringing you right back to where you started. With a narrative that feels claustrophobic, riddled with tension, which causes you to tremble with unease. You might just forget to breathe, and it’s all so exhilarating.
It starts off with a murder; a sinister and gruesome discovery of a rotting corpse by a band of local boys. The victim is The Witch, a mysterious figure in the village; a symbol of both fear and respect. The most fascinating element is what we learn about the Witch as the novel unfolds in all its nightmarish glory. Each chapter peels away another layer of the Witch, and by doing so, also manages to shine a light on contemporary social issues. By the time you reach the end, The Witch is nothing like what you initially suspected. It’s easy (and lazy) to paint every character as a scumbag and leave it as that. Each character is representative of the disenfranchised members of society; those who are messed up by the system, those who have been told they don’t matter.
Themes galore in this novel: violence, misogyny, homophobia, greed, corruption, police brutality, superstition, sexuality, rape, self-hatred, fetishes, rumors, poverty, pedophilia, and prejudice. Things you can expect to feel while reading this book: Shock, awe, breathlessness, exasperation, anger, terror, admiration, and nauseous (that one scene ughhh --you’ll know what scene).
One of the best books I’ve ever laid my eyes on. FEARLESS. 🔥
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-VbMRFgn...
It starts off with a murder; a sinister and gruesome discovery of a rotting corpse by a band of local boys. The victim is The Witch, a mysterious figure in the village; a symbol of both fear and respect. The most fascinating element is what we learn about the Witch as the novel unfolds in all its nightmarish glory. Each chapter peels away another layer of the Witch, and by doing so, also manages to shine a light on contemporary social issues. By the time you reach the end, The Witch is nothing like what you initially suspected. It’s easy (and lazy) to paint every character as a scumbag and leave it as that. Each character is representative of the disenfranchised members of society; those who are messed up by the system, those who have been told they don’t matter.
Themes galore in this novel: violence, misogyny, homophobia, greed, corruption, police brutality, superstition, sexuality, rape, self-hatred, fetishes, rumors, poverty, pedophilia, and prejudice. Things you can expect to feel while reading this book: Shock, awe, breathlessness, exasperation, anger, terror, admiration, and nauseous (that one scene ughhh --you’ll know what scene).
One of the best books I’ve ever laid my eyes on. FEARLESS. 🔥
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-VbMRFgn...
June 1, 2017
No sé por dónde empezar mi admiración hacia Fernanda Melchor y lo que ha hecho con esta novela. La estructura, la narración, la forma de hilar cada una de las historias de los personajes y sobre todo contar con las palabras precisas que hacen que estos personajes sean reales y crueles.
Temporada de huracanes es una novela que no te deja respirar, quizás a propósito, por la forma en que Melchor elige esos párrafos que nunca llegan o quizás porque El Luismi, El Brando, El Munra y todos los demás personajes no te permiten cerrar el libro hasta saber qué pasó con La Bruja y la razón por la que su cadáver se encuentra flotando en un canal de riego en La Matosa.
Estoy maravillada por el la forma en que Melchor usa el lenguaje y lo convierte en un arma. Es la neta.
Temporada de huracanes es una novela que no te deja respirar, quizás a propósito, por la forma en que Melchor elige esos párrafos que nunca llegan o quizás porque El Luismi, El Brando, El Munra y todos los demás personajes no te permiten cerrar el libro hasta saber qué pasó con La Bruja y la razón por la que su cadáver se encuentra flotando en un canal de riego en La Matosa.
Estoy maravillada por el la forma en que Melchor usa el lenguaje y lo convierte en un arma. Es la neta.
February 27, 2020
At the centre of “Hurricane Season” is a mysterious murder in a small Mexican village. The locals only referred to this notorious individual who is found floating dead in a body of water as “The Witch”. There are tales that she hoarded vast quantities of rare coins and valuable jewels in her home, that she had mystical powers to cast spells and that she regularly hosted depraved orgies. This makes her a figure of high intrigue as well as a target for violence. The novel gives a series of accounts from several individuals who were acquainted with the Witch and gradually explains the dramatic events and circumstances which lead to her death. Many of these characters are mere adolescents or teenagers engaged in very adult situations. In reading the dizzying fervour of their stories we get a wider view of this deeply troubled community and receive the author’s stealthy commentary upon it. It’s utterly hypnotic, gripping and filled with dexterous storytelling.
Read my full review of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor on LonesomeReader
July 29, 2020
"Temporada de huracanes" o del verbo que se hizo vértigo (Podcast, 2020)
En Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3s6q...
En Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0...
En Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ladridospod...
(Reseña, 2018)
Entro corto para comentar el entusiasmo que me ha producido esta lectura. Fernanda Melchor se ganó a pulso un puesto entre mi panteón particular, con estatua de escayola y efigie en el desierto y veladoras encendidas frente a ese ritmo suyo en la narración, ese dominio de los registros que como lector agradezco y contemplo con el silencio de lo sagrado.
Temporada de huracanes es una novela brutal, donde la agonía de lo narrado se enlaza con la agonía de la forma (en términos de lucha esta segunda) para entregar un libro en el cual perderse, un laberinto sin pasajes y galerías y muros ciegos, sino abierto en la inmensidad desolada de su propuesta. Puro terreno llano alrededor y la única lucecita de esperanza colgada en el cielo, lejana, como única salida inalcanzable.
En términos de fábula, la columna es sencilla: un asesinato en la primera escena, la reconstrucción de los hechos en el resto del libro. Sin embargo, este hilar hacia atrás es la menor de las características admirables en el relato. Poco importa el uso de la estructura policial al momento de enganchar a los lectores; poco, también, la crudeza del tema, la violencia expresada en cada página. Lo realmente importante aquí, el motivo por el cuál prenderé veladoras a Melchor, es la sublimación a través de la belleza: Temporada de huracanes es tremendamente hermoso.
Por Temporada de huracanes desfilan todos los tipos posibles de violencia. Todos. Sin embargo, ante la posibilidad de la exposición morbosa y clínica del noticiero, opone el arte sus mecanismos. Aquí hay un acto capaz de sublimar el dolor, consiguiendo la limpieza del lector a través del sufrimiento de la lectura. Primero: es imposible no leer la novela sin cierta preparación ritual, los capítulos escritos en bloques de un sólo párrafo, ocupan, a veces, más de cuarenta páginas. Se necesita, entonces, prepararse para la lectura. Desconectarse un tiempo largo en cada sentada.
Segundo: la habilidad de Melchor para narrar musicalmente, para usar los cambios en las voces narrativas, para jugar con entrar y salir de la primera persona a la tercera, del personalísimo yo al anónimo agente de policía, convierte la experiencia de lectura en un gozo agónico: sufrimos y expiamos al pasar por su propuesta. Esto no es sencillo, esto no es ejecutable sin la pericia y el arrojo necesarios. Cada capítulo es un esfuerzo para el lector y ese esfuerzo termina causando el éxtasis del esfuerzo físico: el pico de adrenalina, la liberación. Aquí la catarsis, tan jodida de conseguir cuando el tema es la manoseada violencia, la sobreexplotada violencia.
La novela es vértigo. Como la parte de los crímenes en 2666, como las páginas finales de Los ejércitos, como ese poema en medio de La dimensión desconocida, como los apartes narrados por Joaquín Borja en Rebelión de los oficios inútiles, aquí Melchor suelta un río y es inútil bracear en contra. Hay que dejarse llevar, hay que permitir que el cuerpo se magulle contras las rocas, hay que sangrar corriente abajo mientras nadamos rodeados de cadáveres.
La música de Melchor se despliega, íntima y entera, en el capítulo primero. Una página que debe bastar para que quien la lea sepa que debe terminar el libro entero. Por si fuera poco, también el silencio está hecho con orfebrería maestra. Lo que se cuenta fuera de foco está tan nítido como lo pintado en el centro.
Gran labor este libro. Grandísima obra. Con todo el respeto me inclino ante la fuerza de sus páginas y levanto luego el rostro hacia el cielo para esperar la lluvia con los ojos abiertos.
En Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3s6q...
En Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0...
En Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ladridospod...
(Reseña, 2018)
Entro corto para comentar el entusiasmo que me ha producido esta lectura. Fernanda Melchor se ganó a pulso un puesto entre mi panteón particular, con estatua de escayola y efigie en el desierto y veladoras encendidas frente a ese ritmo suyo en la narración, ese dominio de los registros que como lector agradezco y contemplo con el silencio de lo sagrado.
Temporada de huracanes es una novela brutal, donde la agonía de lo narrado se enlaza con la agonía de la forma (en términos de lucha esta segunda) para entregar un libro en el cual perderse, un laberinto sin pasajes y galerías y muros ciegos, sino abierto en la inmensidad desolada de su propuesta. Puro terreno llano alrededor y la única lucecita de esperanza colgada en el cielo, lejana, como única salida inalcanzable.
En términos de fábula, la columna es sencilla: un asesinato en la primera escena, la reconstrucción de los hechos en el resto del libro. Sin embargo, este hilar hacia atrás es la menor de las características admirables en el relato. Poco importa el uso de la estructura policial al momento de enganchar a los lectores; poco, también, la crudeza del tema, la violencia expresada en cada página. Lo realmente importante aquí, el motivo por el cuál prenderé veladoras a Melchor, es la sublimación a través de la belleza: Temporada de huracanes es tremendamente hermoso.
Por Temporada de huracanes desfilan todos los tipos posibles de violencia. Todos. Sin embargo, ante la posibilidad de la exposición morbosa y clínica del noticiero, opone el arte sus mecanismos. Aquí hay un acto capaz de sublimar el dolor, consiguiendo la limpieza del lector a través del sufrimiento de la lectura. Primero: es imposible no leer la novela sin cierta preparación ritual, los capítulos escritos en bloques de un sólo párrafo, ocupan, a veces, más de cuarenta páginas. Se necesita, entonces, prepararse para la lectura. Desconectarse un tiempo largo en cada sentada.
Segundo: la habilidad de Melchor para narrar musicalmente, para usar los cambios en las voces narrativas, para jugar con entrar y salir de la primera persona a la tercera, del personalísimo yo al anónimo agente de policía, convierte la experiencia de lectura en un gozo agónico: sufrimos y expiamos al pasar por su propuesta. Esto no es sencillo, esto no es ejecutable sin la pericia y el arrojo necesarios. Cada capítulo es un esfuerzo para el lector y ese esfuerzo termina causando el éxtasis del esfuerzo físico: el pico de adrenalina, la liberación. Aquí la catarsis, tan jodida de conseguir cuando el tema es la manoseada violencia, la sobreexplotada violencia.
La novela es vértigo. Como la parte de los crímenes en 2666, como las páginas finales de Los ejércitos, como ese poema en medio de La dimensión desconocida, como los apartes narrados por Joaquín Borja en Rebelión de los oficios inútiles, aquí Melchor suelta un río y es inútil bracear en contra. Hay que dejarse llevar, hay que permitir que el cuerpo se magulle contras las rocas, hay que sangrar corriente abajo mientras nadamos rodeados de cadáveres.
La música de Melchor se despliega, íntima y entera, en el capítulo primero. Una página que debe bastar para que quien la lea sepa que debe terminar el libro entero. Por si fuera poco, también el silencio está hecho con orfebrería maestra. Lo que se cuenta fuera de foco está tan nítido como lo pintado en el centro.
Gran labor este libro. Grandísima obra. Con todo el respeto me inclino ante la fuerza de sus páginas y levanto luego el rostro hacia el cielo para esperar la lluvia con los ojos abiertos.
March 13, 2020
Now longlisted for the International Booker
Temporada de huracanes by Fernanda Melchor has been translated as Hurricane Season by Sophie Hughes, and published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This is the fourth translation from Hughes I've read, the others being:
The allegorical but visceral The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse by Iván Repila
The Booker International shortlisted The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán
and An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo
and this maintains the excellent quality and is a strong contender to feature in the International Booker. Indeed the importance and quality of the book - both in the original and translation - is evidenced by the blurbs from Claire-Louise Bennett, Jon McGregor, Ben Lerner, Alvaro Enrique, Samanta Schweblin, Yuri Herrera, Alia Trabucco Zeran and Jesse Ball, who comments: ‘Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.’ El Pais recently featured the book as one of the 21 best novels, in Spanish or translated to Spanish of the 21st century to date (https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/11/26...) - the top 2 being 2666 and Austerlitz.
In an interview (https://www.dw.com/en/nightmarish-rea...) Melchor explains the origin of the novel, which originally she'd intended as a non-fictional novel in the footsteps of In Cold Blood, but which she later decided to turn to her own fictional story:
The crime of this novel is revealed in the opening pages - the murder of a women known as The Witch:
They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Young Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some time-worn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the old crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else. She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the Witch wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even just to sit still under the table so that she could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their snivelling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was almost always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway, and why do they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d blub, what was the point of it all, they’d moan, they might as well be dead, just call it a day, wished they’d never been born, and with the corner of their shawls they’d dry the tears from their faces, which they covered in any case the moment they left the Witch’s kitchen, because they weren’t about to give those bigmouths in town the satisfaction of going around saying how they’d been to see the Witch to plot their revenge against so-and-so, how they’d put a curse on the slut leading their husband astray, because there was always one, always some miserable bitch in town spinning yarns about the girls who, quite innocently, minding their own business, went to the Witch’s for a remedy for indigestion for that dipshit at home clogged up to his nuts on the kilo of crisps he ate in one sitting, or a tea to keep tiredness at bay, or an ointment for tummy troubles, or, let’s be honest, just to sit there awhile and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats.
The elder Witch initially gained her reputation when her husband Manolo Condes (she was his 2nd wife) died - ostensibly of a heart attack but his step-sons were vocally unconvinced, only to swiftly meet an untidy end themselves:
An evil woman, it turned out, because, who knows how, some say with the devil in her ear, she had learned of a herb that grew wild up in the mountains, almost at the summit, among the old ruins that, according to those suits from the government, were the ancient tombs of men who’d once lived up there, the first dwellers, there even before those filthy Spaniards who, from their boats, took one look at all that land spread out before them and said finders keepers, this land belongs to us and to the Kingdom of Castile; and the ancients, the few who were left, had to run for the hills and they lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78, what with the landslide, the avalanche of mud that swamped more than a hundred locals from La Matosa and the ruins where those herbs were said to grow, the herbs that the Witch boiled up into an odourless, colourless poison so imperceptible that even the doctor from Villa concluded Manolo had died of a heart attack, but those pig-headed sons of his swore blind that he’d been poisoned, and later everyone blamed the Witch for the sons’ deaths too, because on the very same day they buried their father, the devil came and took them on the highway, on their way to the cemetery in Villa, heading up the funeral procession; the pair of them died crushed under a stack of metal joists that slid off the truck in front; blood-smeared steel all over the next day’s papers, the whole thing more than a little creepy because no one could explain how such a thing could have happened, how those joists had come loose from the fastening cable and smashed through the windscreen, skewering them both, and there was no shortage of people who put two and two together and blamed the Witch, who said the Witch had put a curse on them, that the evil wench had sold her soul to the devil in exchange for special powers, all to hold on to the house and surrounding land, and it was around then that the Witch locked herself away in the house never to leave again, not by day or night, perhaps for fear the Condes were waiting to take their revenge, or maybe because she was hiding something, a secret she couldn’t let out of her sight, something in the house that she refused to leave unguarded, and she grew thin and pale and just looking her in the eyes sent a chill through you because it was clear she’d gone mad, and it was the women of La Matosa who brought her food in exchange for her help preparing their lotions and potions, concoctions brewed either with the herbs that the Witch grew in her vegetable garden or with the wild plants she sent the women to forage on the mountainside, back when there was still a mountainside to speak of.
Rumours spreads that the Witch had, in her large house, inherited from Manolo, hidden somewhere, or so the story went, the money, a shedload of gold coins that Don Manolo had inherited from his father and never banked, not forgetting the diamond, the diamond ring that no one had ever seen, not even the sons, but that was said to hold a stone so big it looked fake.
Following her mother's death in a hurricane-induced landslide, the Young Witch inherits her clientele and sorcery, but also hosts wild drug-fuelled parties with the local youth.
At the novel’s heart are four single-paragraph chapters, with labyrinthine sentences, each written from the perspective of one of the characters involved in the events:
- Yesenia, a young woman, who saw her drug addicted cousin Luismi carrying the Witch from her house with one of his friends, Brando.
- Munra, Luismi’s stepfather, who drove the them away
- Norma, a girl who fled her abusive stepfather and moved in with Luismi
- Brando
Yesenia reports what she sees to the police, who are more interested in finding what happened to the rumoured treasure than what happened to the victim. And the story the characters tells is one of violence, sexual promiscuity, abuse, drugs and poverty, but also one where the grim reality of modern life is intertwined with folklore.
4 stars
Temporada de huracanes by Fernanda Melchor has been translated as Hurricane Season by Sophie Hughes, and published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This is the fourth translation from Hughes I've read, the others being:
The allegorical but visceral The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse by Iván Repila
The Booker International shortlisted The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán
and An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo
and this maintains the excellent quality and is a strong contender to feature in the International Booker. Indeed the importance and quality of the book - both in the original and translation - is evidenced by the blurbs from Claire-Louise Bennett, Jon McGregor, Ben Lerner, Alvaro Enrique, Samanta Schweblin, Yuri Herrera, Alia Trabucco Zeran and Jesse Ball, who comments: ‘Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.’ El Pais recently featured the book as one of the 21 best novels, in Spanish or translated to Spanish of the 21st century to date (https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/11/26...) - the top 2 being 2666 and Austerlitz.
In an interview (https://www.dw.com/en/nightmarish-rea...) Melchor explains the origin of the novel, which originally she'd intended as a non-fictional novel in the footsteps of In Cold Blood, but which she later decided to turn to her own fictional story:
Fernanda Melchor: When I was living in Veracruz, I worked for a social communications office of my university, and we got all the local and regional papers from Veracruz. Much of the news had to do with violence and crime in the area — crimes of passion committed by normal people. And I saw this small newspaper chronicle that talked about a person found dead in a canal in a small village next to where I was.. See also https://www.cunning-folk.com/book-clu...
I was surprised because the journalist told the story in a way that made it sound normal to think that a crime could be motivated by witchcraft… The murderer had killed the witch because she was doing witchcraft to make him fall back in love with her. I was stunned by this and I just wanted to write the story behind the crime.
The crime of this novel is revealed in the opening pages - the murder of a women known as The Witch:
They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Young Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some time-worn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the old crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else. She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the Witch wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even just to sit still under the table so that she could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their snivelling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was almost always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway, and why do they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d blub, what was the point of it all, they’d moan, they might as well be dead, just call it a day, wished they’d never been born, and with the corner of their shawls they’d dry the tears from their faces, which they covered in any case the moment they left the Witch’s kitchen, because they weren’t about to give those bigmouths in town the satisfaction of going around saying how they’d been to see the Witch to plot their revenge against so-and-so, how they’d put a curse on the slut leading their husband astray, because there was always one, always some miserable bitch in town spinning yarns about the girls who, quite innocently, minding their own business, went to the Witch’s for a remedy for indigestion for that dipshit at home clogged up to his nuts on the kilo of crisps he ate in one sitting, or a tea to keep tiredness at bay, or an ointment for tummy troubles, or, let’s be honest, just to sit there awhile and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats.
The elder Witch initially gained her reputation when her husband Manolo Condes (she was his 2nd wife) died - ostensibly of a heart attack but his step-sons were vocally unconvinced, only to swiftly meet an untidy end themselves:
An evil woman, it turned out, because, who knows how, some say with the devil in her ear, she had learned of a herb that grew wild up in the mountains, almost at the summit, among the old ruins that, according to those suits from the government, were the ancient tombs of men who’d once lived up there, the first dwellers, there even before those filthy Spaniards who, from their boats, took one look at all that land spread out before them and said finders keepers, this land belongs to us and to the Kingdom of Castile; and the ancients, the few who were left, had to run for the hills and they lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78, what with the landslide, the avalanche of mud that swamped more than a hundred locals from La Matosa and the ruins where those herbs were said to grow, the herbs that the Witch boiled up into an odourless, colourless poison so imperceptible that even the doctor from Villa concluded Manolo had died of a heart attack, but those pig-headed sons of his swore blind that he’d been poisoned, and later everyone blamed the Witch for the sons’ deaths too, because on the very same day they buried their father, the devil came and took them on the highway, on their way to the cemetery in Villa, heading up the funeral procession; the pair of them died crushed under a stack of metal joists that slid off the truck in front; blood-smeared steel all over the next day’s papers, the whole thing more than a little creepy because no one could explain how such a thing could have happened, how those joists had come loose from the fastening cable and smashed through the windscreen, skewering them both, and there was no shortage of people who put two and two together and blamed the Witch, who said the Witch had put a curse on them, that the evil wench had sold her soul to the devil in exchange for special powers, all to hold on to the house and surrounding land, and it was around then that the Witch locked herself away in the house never to leave again, not by day or night, perhaps for fear the Condes were waiting to take their revenge, or maybe because she was hiding something, a secret she couldn’t let out of her sight, something in the house that she refused to leave unguarded, and she grew thin and pale and just looking her in the eyes sent a chill through you because it was clear she’d gone mad, and it was the women of La Matosa who brought her food in exchange for her help preparing their lotions and potions, concoctions brewed either with the herbs that the Witch grew in her vegetable garden or with the wild plants she sent the women to forage on the mountainside, back when there was still a mountainside to speak of.
Rumours spreads that the Witch had, in her large house, inherited from Manolo, hidden somewhere, or so the story went, the money, a shedload of gold coins that Don Manolo had inherited from his father and never banked, not forgetting the diamond, the diamond ring that no one had ever seen, not even the sons, but that was said to hold a stone so big it looked fake.
Following her mother's death in a hurricane-induced landslide, the Young Witch inherits her clientele and sorcery, but also hosts wild drug-fuelled parties with the local youth.
At the novel’s heart are four single-paragraph chapters, with labyrinthine sentences, each written from the perspective of one of the characters involved in the events:
- Yesenia, a young woman, who saw her drug addicted cousin Luismi carrying the Witch from her house with one of his friends, Brando.
- Munra, Luismi’s stepfather, who drove the them away
- Norma, a girl who fled her abusive stepfather and moved in with Luismi
- Brando
Yesenia reports what she sees to the police, who are more interested in finding what happened to the rumoured treasure than what happened to the victim. And the story the characters tells is one of violence, sexual promiscuity, abuse, drugs and poverty, but also one where the grim reality of modern life is intertwined with folklore.
4 stars
October 1, 2020
Considerada una de las promesas de la narrativa mexicana, Fernanda Melchor nos presenta un trabajo soberbio. Una novela llena de realidades sórdidas donde no hay tonos blancos ni negros, en Temporada de huracanes reina inescrupulosamente los grises. Escritora y periodista, la autora posee un perfecto dominio para narrar la crudeza de la cotidianeidad de sus personajes, todo esto dentro de una trama explícita creando así, una conmovedora historia.
La trama gira entorno al hallazgo de una mujer asesinada a la que llaman La Bruja, por parte de unos niños en un río de un pueblo llamado La Matosa en México. Pronto, como si se tratara de un rompecabezas, iremos construyendo una crónica roja entorno al crimen y conociendo a unos personajes que rozan la marginalidad y donde fácilmente cada uno puede reflejar una problemática social distinta. Son las diversas perspectivas acompañadas de un lenguaje popular utilizado por su autora que sumado a una prosa vertiginosa, ofrencen un desarrollo increíblemente complejo de sus personajes.
Temporada de Huracanes propone un estilo brillante aunque demandante, es de las novelas que significan un reto al lector pero que es retribuido enormemente con una atrapante historia. Sus extensos capítulos forman puntos de vista distintos que van armando la totalidad de la trama. Una narrativa abrumadora pero que se adhiere y se justifica a las circunstancias de sus personajes. La novela termina siendo una crítica y una denuncia de una sociedad que le da la espalda a una realidad de la que muy pocos hablan y donde la autora muestra la otra cara de los culpables e inocentes.
Tras su exitosa publicación en el 2017, tuvo un excelente recibimiento por parte de la critica que la llevó a estar nominada para el prestigioso Premio Man Booker International. Temporada de Huracanes se convierte en una de las mejores novelas latinoamericanas escritas en los últimos años. Una historia que abarca temas de machismo y violencia donde el amor es el gran ausente, pero que gran parte de las acciones de sus personajes siempre están relacionadas en su búsqueda. Es inevitable leer Temporada de Huracanes y que automáticamente no se convierta en una de tus novelas favoritas. Narrada con una crudeza pero no lejos de la realidad, Fernanda Melchor presenta una maravilla de libro.
La trama gira entorno al hallazgo de una mujer asesinada a la que llaman La Bruja, por parte de unos niños en un río de un pueblo llamado La Matosa en México. Pronto, como si se tratara de un rompecabezas, iremos construyendo una crónica roja entorno al crimen y conociendo a unos personajes que rozan la marginalidad y donde fácilmente cada uno puede reflejar una problemática social distinta. Son las diversas perspectivas acompañadas de un lenguaje popular utilizado por su autora que sumado a una prosa vertiginosa, ofrencen un desarrollo increíblemente complejo de sus personajes.
Temporada de Huracanes propone un estilo brillante aunque demandante, es de las novelas que significan un reto al lector pero que es retribuido enormemente con una atrapante historia. Sus extensos capítulos forman puntos de vista distintos que van armando la totalidad de la trama. Una narrativa abrumadora pero que se adhiere y se justifica a las circunstancias de sus personajes. La novela termina siendo una crítica y una denuncia de una sociedad que le da la espalda a una realidad de la que muy pocos hablan y donde la autora muestra la otra cara de los culpables e inocentes.
Tras su exitosa publicación en el 2017, tuvo un excelente recibimiento por parte de la critica que la llevó a estar nominada para el prestigioso Premio Man Booker International. Temporada de Huracanes se convierte en una de las mejores novelas latinoamericanas escritas en los últimos años. Una historia que abarca temas de machismo y violencia donde el amor es el gran ausente, pero que gran parte de las acciones de sus personajes siempre están relacionadas en su búsqueda. Es inevitable leer Temporada de Huracanes y que automáticamente no se convierta en una de tus novelas favoritas. Narrada con una crudeza pero no lejos de la realidad, Fernanda Melchor presenta una maravilla de libro.
June 6, 2020
Not for me, certainly not at this time.
I went into this very quickly because it was short, I wanted to read more Mexican literature, the setting and witches sounded cool, and people had good things to say about the style. Oh boy, I did not know what I was getting myself into...
In terms of the positives: it started out well. The witches are definitely interesting characters. Good setting and atmosphere. I enjoyed the narrative structure, especially at the beginning.
The style is fine. I enjoyed the extremely colloquial language (good luck to translators!). Mostly (obviously deliberate) run-on sentences that serve their purpose (must have been fun for copy-editors!). The form generally does compliment the content well (if you like to think of those two things as separate, ha). Nothing really special for me, to be honest. Some people are still impressed by unrestrained streams of gritty, dirty prose – I’m not. It’s always amusing to see people thinking not using full stops equals actually writing long sentences, syntactically speaking. There’s nothing impressive about conjunctions and commas in my book; there’s still 60 sentences there, just broken up in a non-standard way. Not @ing the author on this, just reviewers, particularly professional ones, who are genuinely wowed by this and think it’s somehow subversive in the year twenty twenty (2020). As a stylistic choice, I have no problem with it, but let’s not kid ourselves about what’s actually being achieved.
I’m really not sure what the author was attempting to achieve with her brutally graphic descriptions of bestiality, sexual abuse of children, extreme poverty, misogyny, rape, murder, sex work, drug addiction, narcos, back-alley abortion, homophobia and a long etcetera. She refuses to stay focused on one of these issues long enough to engage with it in any meaningful way other than “this is happening and look how sordid” before moving on to the next. Everything is awful at the same time is the point, surely? Is that it? Things are bad in this community so I’m going to describe them in an extra graphic way. Cool! Is it in any way enlightening? Cathartic (for reader or author)? Educational? Nuanced? Reflexive? Critical? Coming from a place of experience? I don’t think so...
I really think she tried to cover WAY too much and failed quite a bit. Her handling of homophobia and approaches to trans issues were sloppy at best. This insistence on just showcasing misogynist and homophobic attitudes constantly without any sort of analysis is obviously deliberate, and very questionable considering the many, many perspectives in the narrative. Do the women reflect on their experiences with sexism so we get to hear them from their perspective? Why bother! Just have them throw the F word around instead and focus entirely on the fact that they too are homophobic and have internalised misogyny, ha ha :) Do we get to see the gay characters reflect on their experiences with homophobia? Why bother, when we could just focus exclusively on how they too are sexist. There’s no time for any reflection when you could be talking about who’s getting murdered/abused/degraded in the most sordid way next. A shame to deliberately miss the characterisation opportunities all these different narrative perspectives bring. God forbid we get to hear about !
I’ve not done much research on the author, but what I’ve read about her inspiration for the novel and background has made me uncomfortable. I really hope it’s not just misery tourism from an outsider (not in the geographical sense, of course) considering this interview and some others I’ve seen. I would really hate for that to be the case, but I also think it would explain a lot, unfortunately. I really hope I’m wrong. It shocks me that there’s no discussion on the ethics of making this sort of “realist fiction” in any of her interviews, even when she’s showing real pictures of criminals from deprived areas and newspaper stories she used for “inspiration”. Why is she writing fiction about this? Is it coming from a place of experience and desire to explore and offer critique? Or is it just misery porn from an outsider and for outsiders?
It honestly really reminded me of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. That’s something I read years ago, and even though I don’t remember much about it other than the general feeling of “absolutely everything and everyone is awful and there is no hope so let’s cram as much graphic horribleness from marginalised people as we can into a few hundred pages”, I did REALLY like it at the time (oh, to be an edgy 16yo again [god no]). I have a feeling I’d feel exactly the same way about Last Exit that I do about Hurricane Season if I were to reread it now, not that I’m remotely interested in testing that theory out (likewise, I probably would have loved Temporada de Huracanes then).
Anyway, no interest in this sort of thing. All it does is drive you into despair without even providing any catharsis while offering no real substantial critique on ANY of these topics (beyond depicting them graphically) from an author whose experience and motivations for writing about these things are unclear at best. If I wanted to engage with these topics, I could be reading non-fiction or non-trashy investigative journalism about it (which, at the very least, works towards raising awareness of real victims and ideally explores ways of improving things); or fiction about these issues where they're handled in a different way, from a different perspective and in a more nuanced manner, or at least in a less gratuitously sordid one.
All in all, awful!
I went into this very quickly because it was short, I wanted to read more Mexican literature, the setting and witches sounded cool, and people had good things to say about the style. Oh boy, I did not know what I was getting myself into...
In terms of the positives: it started out well. The witches are definitely interesting characters. Good setting and atmosphere. I enjoyed the narrative structure, especially at the beginning.
The style is fine. I enjoyed the extremely colloquial language (good luck to translators!). Mostly (obviously deliberate) run-on sentences that serve their purpose (must have been fun for copy-editors!). The form generally does compliment the content well (if you like to think of those two things as separate, ha). Nothing really special for me, to be honest. Some people are still impressed by unrestrained streams of gritty, dirty prose – I’m not. It’s always amusing to see people thinking not using full stops equals actually writing long sentences, syntactically speaking. There’s nothing impressive about conjunctions and commas in my book; there’s still 60 sentences there, just broken up in a non-standard way. Not @ing the author on this, just reviewers, particularly professional ones, who are genuinely wowed by this and think it’s somehow subversive in the year twenty twenty (2020). As a stylistic choice, I have no problem with it, but let’s not kid ourselves about what’s actually being achieved.
I’m really not sure what the author was attempting to achieve with her brutally graphic descriptions of bestiality, sexual abuse of children, extreme poverty, misogyny, rape, murder, sex work, drug addiction, narcos, back-alley abortion, homophobia and a long etcetera. She refuses to stay focused on one of these issues long enough to engage with it in any meaningful way other than “this is happening and look how sordid” before moving on to the next. Everything is awful at the same time is the point, surely? Is that it? Things are bad in this community so I’m going to describe them in an extra graphic way. Cool! Is it in any way enlightening? Cathartic (for reader or author)? Educational? Nuanced? Reflexive? Critical? Coming from a place of experience? I don’t think so...
I really think she tried to cover WAY too much and failed quite a bit. Her handling of homophobia and approaches to trans issues were sloppy at best. This insistence on just showcasing misogynist and homophobic attitudes constantly without any sort of analysis is obviously deliberate, and very questionable considering the many, many perspectives in the narrative. Do the women reflect on their experiences with sexism so we get to hear them from their perspective? Why bother! Just have them throw the F word around instead and focus entirely on the fact that they too are homophobic and have internalised misogyny, ha ha :) Do we get to see the gay characters reflect on their experiences with homophobia? Why bother, when we could just focus exclusively on how they too are sexist. There’s no time for any reflection when you could be talking about who’s getting murdered/abused/degraded in the most sordid way next. A shame to deliberately miss the characterisation opportunities all these different narrative perspectives bring. God forbid we get to hear about !
I’ve not done much research on the author, but what I’ve read about her inspiration for the novel and background has made me uncomfortable. I really hope it’s not just misery tourism from an outsider (not in the geographical sense, of course) considering this interview and some others I’ve seen. I would really hate for that to be the case, but I also think it would explain a lot, unfortunately. I really hope I’m wrong. It shocks me that there’s no discussion on the ethics of making this sort of “realist fiction” in any of her interviews, even when she’s showing real pictures of criminals from deprived areas and newspaper stories she used for “inspiration”. Why is she writing fiction about this? Is it coming from a place of experience and desire to explore and offer critique? Or is it just misery porn from an outsider and for outsiders?
It honestly really reminded me of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. That’s something I read years ago, and even though I don’t remember much about it other than the general feeling of “absolutely everything and everyone is awful and there is no hope so let’s cram as much graphic horribleness from marginalised people as we can into a few hundred pages”, I did REALLY like it at the time (oh, to be an edgy 16yo again [god no]). I have a feeling I’d feel exactly the same way about Last Exit that I do about Hurricane Season if I were to reread it now, not that I’m remotely interested in testing that theory out (likewise, I probably would have loved Temporada de Huracanes then).
Anyway, no interest in this sort of thing. All it does is drive you into despair without even providing any catharsis while offering no real substantial critique on ANY of these topics (beyond depicting them graphically) from an author whose experience and motivations for writing about these things are unclear at best. If I wanted to engage with these topics, I could be reading non-fiction or non-trashy investigative journalism about it (which, at the very least, works towards raising awareness of real victims and ideally explores ways of improving things); or fiction about these issues where they're handled in a different way, from a different perspective and in a more nuanced manner, or at least in a less gratuitously sordid one.
All in all, awful!
February 2, 2023
¿Por dónde se empieza a hablar de un libro que te pasa por encima y te deja temblando y en ruinas? Mi primera aproximación a Fernanda Melchor me deja agotada pero extasiada. Fascinada ante la aproximación a lo más oscuro del ser humano que plantea y al mismo tiempo, contenta de que no todos los libros sean así porque te deja sin esperanzas ante el horror que presencias.
‘Temporada de huracanes’ es un libro para leer a pecho descubierto, dejándose arrastrar por el flujo incesante de frases infinitas (no hay párrafos, aviso) y la musicalidad y descaro de un lenguaje, que, aunque toma distintos registros, siempre es puro México. Lleno de expresiones y vocabulario nuevos para mí y sin los cuales, no puedo imaginar esta novela. El lenguaje actúa así, no solo como herramienta narrativa, sino también que forma parte de la ambientación.
Y es que Melchor ambienta su novela en La Matosa, una localidad ficticia pero que podría ser cualquier lugar de las cercanías de su Veracruz natal. Este espacio se presenta como un lugar que no ofrece ninguna oportunidad a sus habitantes, cuya vida gira en torno a la violencia, el alcohol, las drogas y el s*xo. La Matosa se presenta como un espacio sin salida, con la excepción tal vez de la muerte. ¿Acaso una suerte de purgatorio? Un lugar donde todo se pudre, lleno de una suciedad y decadencia que te cala hasta los huesos. Un microcosmos donde prima la misoginia, la violencia está implantada en la sociedad como normal y no tiene consecuencias, perpetuándola; donde los rumores demonizan a inocentes, la homofobia y transfobia campan a sus anchas y los abusos están a la vuelta de la esquina.
A partir del descubrimiento del cadáver de “la bruja” del pueblo en un cañaveral, con un fluir de narradores, iremos montando un puzzle que permite conocer tanto a los personajes implicados en el crimen como una imagen completa de la vida en La Matosa. Así, con cada narrador, lo sucedido hasta entonces cobra nuevas dimensiones, convirtiendo a cada personaje en un ser poliédrico, como somos todos en realidad. Es curioso, además, como dentro de esta polifonía de voces narradoras, nunca escuchamos a algunos de los personajes protagonistas y sin embargo, no se echa en falta porque Melchor ha hilado todo con una precisión digna de un reloj suizo.
A pesar de que todo comienza con un crimen, no penséis ni por un momento que se trata de una novela negra. La intriga no gira en torno al quién cometió el crimen, sino que busca ahondar en el porqué. ¿Cuál es el origen del mal? Y así, tirando y tirando del hilo, se crea algo así como una “cadena de culpas” que te hace comprender cada crimen cometido en la novela. OJO, no perdonar, no empatizar, no justificar. Si no, comprender y, si acaso, sentir algo de lástima por quienes acaban cometiendo actos terribles, y esto rompió mis esquemas. ¿Y si la maldad es consecuencia de algo de lo que los personajes no pudieron escapar?: dónde nacieron, cómo son sus familia, su educación, qué oportunidades tuvieron… No es casualidad que todos los personajes estén dañados, rotos, por decirlo de alguna manera, en un lugar donde crecer y vivir con amor o cariño no parece posible. Lo dicho, esta novela te pasa por encima.
Toda la trama está narrada con una enorme sordidez y crueldad, varias escenas que causan horror y repulsión, que te hacen querer apartar la mirada (abusos, violencia, pederastia…), olvidar lo que acabas de leer. No escasean los crímenes, la violencia se muestra de forma directa, especialmente contra las mujeres, sin importar la forma: física, sex*al, psicológica, doméstica, de género; y proveniente de casi todas partes: de los hombres, desconocidos o no, del interior de las propias familias, de las instituciones, de los desastres naturales…
Una novela llena de detalles, simbologías a desentrañar (serpientes, la figura de las brujas, la conexión del río y la muerte…), una modernización de los cuentos clásicos (en palabras de Melchor) para hablar y denunciar la violencia en México y ahondar en el origen del mal.
Me dejo cosas en el tintero pero… no veo cómo abordarlas sin destripar la novela. ‘Temporada de huracanes’ puede gustarte o no, pero es imposible no admirar el control de Melchor sobre la narración, su capacidad para construir personajes y ahondar en el origen del mal, su forma de introducir giros y nuevas capas con cada capítulo. Una novela que ha requerido toda mi atención y mi aire, y me ha parecido magistral y redonda.
WOW. Qué libro
‘Temporada de huracanes’ es un libro para leer a pecho descubierto, dejándose arrastrar por el flujo incesante de frases infinitas (no hay párrafos, aviso) y la musicalidad y descaro de un lenguaje, que, aunque toma distintos registros, siempre es puro México. Lleno de expresiones y vocabulario nuevos para mí y sin los cuales, no puedo imaginar esta novela. El lenguaje actúa así, no solo como herramienta narrativa, sino también que forma parte de la ambientación.
Y es que Melchor ambienta su novela en La Matosa, una localidad ficticia pero que podría ser cualquier lugar de las cercanías de su Veracruz natal. Este espacio se presenta como un lugar que no ofrece ninguna oportunidad a sus habitantes, cuya vida gira en torno a la violencia, el alcohol, las drogas y el s*xo. La Matosa se presenta como un espacio sin salida, con la excepción tal vez de la muerte. ¿Acaso una suerte de purgatorio? Un lugar donde todo se pudre, lleno de una suciedad y decadencia que te cala hasta los huesos. Un microcosmos donde prima la misoginia, la violencia está implantada en la sociedad como normal y no tiene consecuencias, perpetuándola; donde los rumores demonizan a inocentes, la homofobia y transfobia campan a sus anchas y los abusos están a la vuelta de la esquina.
A partir del descubrimiento del cadáver de “la bruja” del pueblo en un cañaveral, con un fluir de narradores, iremos montando un puzzle que permite conocer tanto a los personajes implicados en el crimen como una imagen completa de la vida en La Matosa. Así, con cada narrador, lo sucedido hasta entonces cobra nuevas dimensiones, convirtiendo a cada personaje en un ser poliédrico, como somos todos en realidad. Es curioso, además, como dentro de esta polifonía de voces narradoras, nunca escuchamos a algunos de los personajes protagonistas y sin embargo, no se echa en falta porque Melchor ha hilado todo con una precisión digna de un reloj suizo.
A pesar de que todo comienza con un crimen, no penséis ni por un momento que se trata de una novela negra. La intriga no gira en torno al quién cometió el crimen, sino que busca ahondar en el porqué. ¿Cuál es el origen del mal? Y así, tirando y tirando del hilo, se crea algo así como una “cadena de culpas” que te hace comprender cada crimen cometido en la novela. OJO, no perdonar, no empatizar, no justificar. Si no, comprender y, si acaso, sentir algo de lástima por quienes acaban cometiendo actos terribles, y esto rompió mis esquemas. ¿Y si la maldad es consecuencia de algo de lo que los personajes no pudieron escapar?: dónde nacieron, cómo son sus familia, su educación, qué oportunidades tuvieron… No es casualidad que todos los personajes estén dañados, rotos, por decirlo de alguna manera, en un lugar donde crecer y vivir con amor o cariño no parece posible. Lo dicho, esta novela te pasa por encima.
Toda la trama está narrada con una enorme sordidez y crueldad, varias escenas que causan horror y repulsión, que te hacen querer apartar la mirada (abusos, violencia, pederastia…), olvidar lo que acabas de leer. No escasean los crímenes, la violencia se muestra de forma directa, especialmente contra las mujeres, sin importar la forma: física, sex*al, psicológica, doméstica, de género; y proveniente de casi todas partes: de los hombres, desconocidos o no, del interior de las propias familias, de las instituciones, de los desastres naturales…
Una novela llena de detalles, simbologías a desentrañar (serpientes, la figura de las brujas, la conexión del río y la muerte…), una modernización de los cuentos clásicos (en palabras de Melchor) para hablar y denunciar la violencia en México y ahondar en el origen del mal.
Me dejo cosas en el tintero pero… no veo cómo abordarlas sin destripar la novela. ‘Temporada de huracanes’ puede gustarte o no, pero es imposible no admirar el control de Melchor sobre la narración, su capacidad para construir personajes y ahondar en el origen del mal, su forma de introducir giros y nuevas capas con cada capítulo. Una novela que ha requerido toda mi atención y mi aire, y me ha parecido magistral y redonda.
WOW. Qué libro
August 9, 2020
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020!
I should really stop judging books by their titles. Because I picked this book and thought, "you know what? This is going to be about a hurricane that sweeps away a little town or a village and obviously I'm going to be subjected to the altered dynamics of a dysfunctional family" (groans in exasperation). Well, sue me. Of course a Booker shortlisted book wasn't going to be about a damn clothesline getting swept away by a hurricane, thereby forcing all of the villagers to live in a nudist society.
Oh no, this is much dirtier. This book is so filthy, it would make Henry Miller cower. Make no mistake: this is no erotica. It's a dark, nefarious, salacious tale full of drugs, abuse - both physical and emotional, rape, pedophilia, bestiality, misogyny, homophobia and murder. It's not even much of a tale, really. It's more a force to be reckoned with. It's also part murder mystery - the murder of a queer witch, with each chapter offering a new perspective on the crime. It takes so much of the evil from this world and ambushes you with it. It challenges every bit of that incorrigible Aristotelian virtue you have ingrained into yourself and makes you wonder what would become of this society if humans are left completely free to exercise all of their malevolent desires - really, this book will make you squirm, at every page and almost at every sentence. But fear not! It does offer a conclusion, of sorts.
Don’t you worry, don’t fret, you just lie there, that’s it. The sky flashed with lightning and a muffled boom shook the earth. The rain can’t hurt you now, and the darkness doesn’t last forever. See there? See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole.
Kids, only pick this book if you are willing to tango with the dark side. You'll wonder why such a book was shortlisted for the International Booker prize until you realize that in making you uncomfortable and disgusted, this book has served its purpose.
4.5 stars
I should really stop judging books by their titles. Because I picked this book and thought, "you know what? This is going to be about a hurricane that sweeps away a little town or a village and obviously I'm going to be subjected to the altered dynamics of a dysfunctional family" (groans in exasperation). Well, sue me. Of course a Booker shortlisted book wasn't going to be about a damn clothesline getting swept away by a hurricane, thereby forcing all of the villagers to live in a nudist society.
Oh no, this is much dirtier. This book is so filthy, it would make Henry Miller cower. Make no mistake: this is no erotica. It's a dark, nefarious, salacious tale full of drugs, abuse - both physical and emotional, rape, pedophilia, bestiality, misogyny, homophobia and murder. It's not even much of a tale, really. It's more a force to be reckoned with. It's also part murder mystery - the murder of a queer witch, with each chapter offering a new perspective on the crime. It takes so much of the evil from this world and ambushes you with it. It challenges every bit of that incorrigible Aristotelian virtue you have ingrained into yourself and makes you wonder what would become of this society if humans are left completely free to exercise all of their malevolent desires - really, this book will make you squirm, at every page and almost at every sentence. But fear not! It does offer a conclusion, of sorts.
Don’t you worry, don’t fret, you just lie there, that’s it. The sky flashed with lightning and a muffled boom shook the earth. The rain can’t hurt you now, and the darkness doesn’t last forever. See there? See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole.
Kids, only pick this book if you are willing to tango with the dark side. You'll wonder why such a book was shortlisted for the International Booker prize until you realize that in making you uncomfortable and disgusted, this book has served its purpose.
4.5 stars
April 2, 2020
Entirely told in one tone (shrill) in long run-on sentences and no paragraph breaks. There is absolutely no light and shade, husbands hate their wives, wives hate their husbands, parents resent their children and vice versa, everyone's a puta or a son of a whore. A murder has taken place and we get the back story of the murderers, but it's not exactly the fine touch of a writer like Karin Fossum. I think it's a meditation on how poverty degrades, but then you need some light to contrast the shade, otherwise everyone in this charmless village is a victim of their poor upbringings and have no chance of escape or redemption except the grave. Ugly, real ugly.
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHqUF...
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHqUF...
October 9, 2025
Holy fuck.
With frenzy, darkness, and unimpeded rage, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season dissects Mexico’s culture of—as one narrator puts it—“the full, brutal force of male vice,” after a figure known as “the Witch” is murdered in a small, impoverished village. (Although the novel isn’t set in Juárez, but in her native Veracruz, Melchor speaks to, about, and for all women in Mexico.) Her prose is heady, dizzying, and unrelentingly brutal, depicting how men speak both to and about women, how boys are raised from a young age to feel their superiority over women and “poofs”—in addition to the femicide statistics above, far more than 1,000 documented cases of homophobic violence in Mexico have been recorded—and also how women talk to other women, knowing their bodies are both currency and yet also what make them moving targets in a world where the government and the police care more about money than justice.
Melchor follows the aftermath of the Witch’s murder by fragmenting the narrative, showing us seven unreliable figural narrators who have some part of the backstory to lend to our understanding of what took place. And even that understanding, that “truth,” shifts, morphs, becomes buried beneath misogyny, male privilege, homophobia, and a culture that glorifies violence as evidence of machismo. It’s also a culture that buries truths quite easily beneath superstition and local mythologies: “the black magic rituals and superstitious beliefs which, to the town’s shame, abounded in that place.”
Hurricane Season is a brave, unflinching book, but certainly not an easy one to stomach; all the same, it is essential reading to begin to understand and to give voice to the thousands of women who have been killed by men in Mexico. Melchor’s prose is akin to Bolaño meeting Krasznahorkai in heated conversation with Faulkner, and the darkness here is the darkness of men breeding violence among each other, with women as the casualties.
Melchor’s book is an angry war cry against a culture that praises men for being men; a culture whose victims are forgotten and forever rendered silent; and a culture in which women–who have also internalized this male violence—need to instruct young girls about the violence they will surely encounter in a world one wishes were a nightmare, not the reality that it is.
Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated. You drop your guard for a second and they’ll crush you, Clarita, so you better just tell that fuckwit out there to buy you some clothes. Don’t you be anybody’s fool, that’s what men are like: a bunch of lazy spongers who you have to keep rounding up to squeeze any use out of them…From 1993 to 2005, there were more than 370 female murders (femicides or feminicidios) in Juárez; in Mexico more broadly, between 1986 and 2009, there were an estimated 34,000 female homicides. And this number is likely much higher: although the far-from-reputable UK Sun estimates the Juárez total to be around 1,500, this number is likely closer to the truth: as The Guardian reported in February 2020: there were “119 homicides in the city [of Juárez] during January this year, and 46 to date in February. Last weekend alone counted 18 murders.”
With frenzy, darkness, and unimpeded rage, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season dissects Mexico’s culture of—as one narrator puts it—“the full, brutal force of male vice,” after a figure known as “the Witch” is murdered in a small, impoverished village. (Although the novel isn’t set in Juárez, but in her native Veracruz, Melchor speaks to, about, and for all women in Mexico.) Her prose is heady, dizzying, and unrelentingly brutal, depicting how men speak both to and about women, how boys are raised from a young age to feel their superiority over women and “poofs”—in addition to the femicide statistics above, far more than 1,000 documented cases of homophobic violence in Mexico have been recorded—and also how women talk to other women, knowing their bodies are both currency and yet also what make them moving targets in a world where the government and the police care more about money than justice.
Melchor follows the aftermath of the Witch’s murder by fragmenting the narrative, showing us seven unreliable figural narrators who have some part of the backstory to lend to our understanding of what took place. And even that understanding, that “truth,” shifts, morphs, becomes buried beneath misogyny, male privilege, homophobia, and a culture that glorifies violence as evidence of machismo. It’s also a culture that buries truths quite easily beneath superstition and local mythologies: “the black magic rituals and superstitious beliefs which, to the town’s shame, abounded in that place.”
Hurricane Season is a brave, unflinching book, but certainly not an easy one to stomach; all the same, it is essential reading to begin to understand and to give voice to the thousands of women who have been killed by men in Mexico. Melchor’s prose is akin to Bolaño meeting Krasznahorkai in heated conversation with Faulkner, and the darkness here is the darkness of men breeding violence among each other, with women as the casualties.
Melchor’s book is an angry war cry against a culture that praises men for being men; a culture whose victims are forgotten and forever rendered silent; and a culture in which women–who have also internalized this male violence—need to instruct young girls about the violence they will surely encounter in a world one wishes were a nightmare, not the reality that it is.
August 1, 2024
Una novela dura, oscura, abrasiva. Una novela que te hace retorcerte de bronca, ahogarte de angustia. Una novela que está lejos, muy lejos, de constituir una experiencia placentera. Fernanda Melchor no busca acariciarnos con su prosa sino clavarnos un cuchillo en el pecho… o en la garganta. Y lo extraordinario es que aunque se trata de una historia ficticia con personajes y una sucesión de actos inventados, es a la vez un testimonio de miseria, de odio, de violencia que es ineludiblemente veraz.
La historia arranca con el cadáver de la bruja en el río. La bruja asesinada. Desde ahí la autora va hilvanando una historia contada a través de varias voces, proporcionándonos distintos puntos de vista, retazos de un rompecabezas atroz. La matosa, un pueblo en México, es testigo, escenario y artífice de esta obra de drogadicción, de abusos, de orgías, supersticiones y abortos, de crimen, de homofobia, de codicia. Una historia sobre la cara más oscura de la pobreza pero más que nada del humano en sí.
Está narrada en un lenguaje muy coloquial, uno llega a sentir genuinamente que está escuchando la confesión de esta gente, envuelta en una sensación de veracidad doliente, opresiva, corrosiva. Para cuando llega a su final, una no tiene siquiera palabras. Léanlo.
La historia arranca con el cadáver de la bruja en el río. La bruja asesinada. Desde ahí la autora va hilvanando una historia contada a través de varias voces, proporcionándonos distintos puntos de vista, retazos de un rompecabezas atroz. La matosa, un pueblo en México, es testigo, escenario y artífice de esta obra de drogadicción, de abusos, de orgías, supersticiones y abortos, de crimen, de homofobia, de codicia. Una historia sobre la cara más oscura de la pobreza pero más que nada del humano en sí.
Está narrada en un lenguaje muy coloquial, uno llega a sentir genuinamente que está escuchando la confesión de esta gente, envuelta en una sensación de veracidad doliente, opresiva, corrosiva. Para cuando llega a su final, una no tiene siquiera palabras. Léanlo.
April 2, 2020
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020
This is another very difficult book to rate and review - it is undoubtedly an impressive feat of writing and translation, but it is hard to derive pleasure from reading such an intense, brutal, savage book.
In her acknowledgments, Melchor mentions being inspired by The Autumn of the Patriarch, which I also found very hard work. This book echoes its chapter long paragraphs consisting mostly of very long sentences - there are only 8 chapters, and the first of these and the last two are very short. The book is not for the squeamish, as violence, sex and expletives appear throughout.
Each of the longer chapters follows a different character, and the linking event is the brutal murder of a so called witch in a bungled attempted robbery. The village of La Matosa is a bleak and hopeless place, and its atmosphere is brilliantly evoked.
This is another very difficult book to rate and review - it is undoubtedly an impressive feat of writing and translation, but it is hard to derive pleasure from reading such an intense, brutal, savage book.
In her acknowledgments, Melchor mentions being inspired by The Autumn of the Patriarch, which I also found very hard work. This book echoes its chapter long paragraphs consisting mostly of very long sentences - there are only 8 chapters, and the first of these and the last two are very short. The book is not for the squeamish, as violence, sex and expletives appear throughout.
Each of the longer chapters follows a different character, and the linking event is the brutal murder of a so called witch in a bungled attempted robbery. The village of La Matosa is a bleak and hopeless place, and its atmosphere is brilliantly evoked.
Read
April 6, 2020Run-on sentences and run-on vulgarity. If that's your thing.
Sixty-page paragraphs with plenty of colons and semi-colons, sometimes a couple of each in a pages-long sentence. The point, I think, was to appear inventive, or maybe grating.
Graphic in the detail. Menstruation and masturbation. Check and check. Homemade abortion. Check. Vaginal, oral and anal sex. Check, check, check. Homosexual sex down to (we are assured) the frenulum. Check. Incest with a minor. Check. Bestiality. Woof. Murder by strangulation and stabbing. Check. Police torture, prostitution, drugs. All checks. Actual employment (any male will do). Uh, no.
I hope I haven't plot-spoiled.
I'm weary, wondering if this is what literature will be post-apocalypse.
Sixty-page paragraphs with plenty of colons and semi-colons, sometimes a couple of each in a pages-long sentence. The point, I think, was to appear inventive, or maybe grating.
Graphic in the detail. Menstruation and masturbation. Check and check. Homemade abortion. Check. Vaginal, oral and anal sex. Check, check, check. Homosexual sex down to (we are assured) the frenulum. Check. Incest with a minor. Check. Bestiality. Woof. Murder by strangulation and stabbing. Check. Police torture, prostitution, drugs. All checks. Actual employment (any male will do). Uh, no.
I hope I haven't plot-spoiled.
I'm weary, wondering if this is what literature will be post-apocalypse.
August 3, 2021
Temporada de huracanes es la primera película de terror que viste cuando eras pequeño, con las manos tapándote los ojos, pero dejando una pequeña rendija con la que seguir asustándote. Temporada de huracanes también es esa noticia de muertes provocadas por el ser humano, que te hace perder la fe en la humanidad pero que no por ello decides cambiar de canal. Temporada de huracanes es, en definitiva, esa realidad que observamos cuando nadie nos mira, por miedo a tener que aceptarla.
Fernanda Melchor inicia el relato cuando cinco niños descubren el cadáver de la Bruja, una mujer que vivía en La Matosa y que era conocida por ciertas habilidades esotéricas que la convertían en una figura respetada dentro de la comunidad. Esta situación se convierte en inicio y final de la historia, pues a partir de aquí cada capítulo tendrá como protagonista a un personaje relacionado con la muerte de la Bruja.
Lo primero que destaca en esta novela es el ritmo. Se ha repetido hasta la saciedad y es su principal característica, con la que es imposible no estar de acuerdo. El ritmo de Temporada de huracanes es trepidante. Cada capítulo es un único párrafo en el que tampoco abundan los puntos. Sin darte cuenta, tu mente se encuentra leyendo a una velocidad sin frenos. De hecho, cuando llegan los finales de capítulo sientes la necesidad de respirar profundamente, de parar y relajarte. Curiosamente, este ritmo no lo convierte en una lectura fácil: se necesita una completa atención a cada frase, cada palabra, puesto que ninguna está colocada de manera gratuita.
Otro de sus mayores aciertos es la creación de personajes. Incluso la Bruja, que se presenta como una mujer misteriosa llena de secretos, acaba pasando a un segundo plano por el conjunto de individuos que van a aportar su particular pieza del puzle que permita resolver el crimen. Todos miserables. Todos desgraciados. En La Matosa no hay lugar para la esperanza. La condición y la realidad de los protagonistas llenan la narración de violencia, destrucción y secretos. En ocasiones incluso juega en los límites de la gratuidad, con escenas verdaderamente desagradables, no sólo por su explicitud, sino también por la realidad que esconden.
Y esa realidad se presenta a través de una sociedad incapaz de explorar su sexualidad, preocupada por las habladurías en una comunidad en la que los rumores se vuelven hechos. El desasosiego y la falta de aire están presentes tanto en el estilo narrativo como en las vivencias de cada uno de los personajes.
Temporada de huracanes se muestra como una novela dura, en ocasiones despreciable, pero que confirma esa sensación de que, por mucho que decidamos apartar la vista de las situaciones que nos desagradan, la realidad seguirá existiendo y no desaparecerá. Las gotas de agua volverán a caer, la tempestad arreciará con más fuerza, y continuaremos denominando a los huracanes con nombres de persona.
Fernanda Melchor inicia el relato cuando cinco niños descubren el cadáver de la Bruja, una mujer que vivía en La Matosa y que era conocida por ciertas habilidades esotéricas que la convertían en una figura respetada dentro de la comunidad. Esta situación se convierte en inicio y final de la historia, pues a partir de aquí cada capítulo tendrá como protagonista a un personaje relacionado con la muerte de la Bruja.
Lo primero que destaca en esta novela es el ritmo. Se ha repetido hasta la saciedad y es su principal característica, con la que es imposible no estar de acuerdo. El ritmo de Temporada de huracanes es trepidante. Cada capítulo es un único párrafo en el que tampoco abundan los puntos. Sin darte cuenta, tu mente se encuentra leyendo a una velocidad sin frenos. De hecho, cuando llegan los finales de capítulo sientes la necesidad de respirar profundamente, de parar y relajarte. Curiosamente, este ritmo no lo convierte en una lectura fácil: se necesita una completa atención a cada frase, cada palabra, puesto que ninguna está colocada de manera gratuita.
Otro de sus mayores aciertos es la creación de personajes. Incluso la Bruja, que se presenta como una mujer misteriosa llena de secretos, acaba pasando a un segundo plano por el conjunto de individuos que van a aportar su particular pieza del puzle que permita resolver el crimen. Todos miserables. Todos desgraciados. En La Matosa no hay lugar para la esperanza. La condición y la realidad de los protagonistas llenan la narración de violencia, destrucción y secretos. En ocasiones incluso juega en los límites de la gratuidad, con escenas verdaderamente desagradables, no sólo por su explicitud, sino también por la realidad que esconden.
Y esa realidad se presenta a través de una sociedad incapaz de explorar su sexualidad, preocupada por las habladurías en una comunidad en la que los rumores se vuelven hechos. El desasosiego y la falta de aire están presentes tanto en el estilo narrativo como en las vivencias de cada uno de los personajes.
Temporada de huracanes se muestra como una novela dura, en ocasiones despreciable, pero que confirma esa sensación de que, por mucho que decidamos apartar la vista de las situaciones que nos desagradan, la realidad seguirá existiendo y no desaparecerá. Las gotas de agua volverán a caer, la tempestad arreciará con más fuerza, y continuaremos denominando a los huracanes con nombres de persona.
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