Fernanda Melchor had originally planned her second novel, Temporada de huracanes, to be nonfiction, something like In Cold Blood. Like Truman Capote before her, she’d read a matter-of-fact newspaper account of a grisly murder (in her case, a Veracruz woman killed and dumped in a canal by a man on whom she was casting love spells) and wanted to explore it further through narrative reporting. But instead of American flyover country, Melchor’s crime took place in a village teeming with cartel hideouts, where people were unlikely to talk and outsiders were likely to be noticed.
Instead, Melchor wrote a work of fiction that explored the “inner lives” of the perpetrators of a similar crime and depicted the grim conditions on the lower rungs of Mexican society. The result, published in Spanish in 2017, has been touted as a masterpiece of Mexican literary fiction. Now making its debut in English through New Directions, Hurricane Season is being further honored as a deeper-than-Deep South successor to William Faulkner. That’s not bad for what amounts to a pragmatic Plan B.
The praise heaped on Hurricane Season gives one the impression that it is a novel not to read so much as reckon with — or at the very least endure. And true enough, the reader is denied such luxuries as paragraph breaks, quotation marks, and coherent transitions from one point of view, scene, or place in time to another. It’s a book that you can’t put down because it won’t let you. Its characters either indulge in or are subject to all of humanity’s worst impulses, rendered in prose emaciated of sentiment. To put it another way, my hatred for the experience of reading this book is equal in proportion to my respect for its intent.
Hurricane Season is structured a bit like a storm. At the eye is “the Witch,” who is dead by the first chapter, her face in the canal “a dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.” She was a reclusive fixture of the impoverished village of La Matosa, where she enjoyed a dual distinction as a boogeyman and the closest thing to a reliable source of authority. The townswomen relied on her for love spells, revenge hexes, holistic cures for ailments such as indigestion, and abortions. To everyone else, she was a figure of ridicule, rumor, and lust. Melchor’s hyperomniscient narrator inhabits the inner monologues, memories, and points of view of different characters in each chapter, but the Witch is not among them, and neither is her murderer, a young ne’er-do-well who lives in his mother’s backyard. Both are spoken of through hearsay as the lowest of an already low place.
The narratives that make up the novel offer vanishingly few glimmers of hope. They are filled with lecherous father figures, indifferent mothers, abusive grandmothers, corrupt police, and overburdened, futureless youth. Employment opportunities seem limited to the oil fields, prostitution, human trafficking, or the drug trade. The Witch’s murder is just one of several La Matosa is filled with:
The passage goes on. Melchor’s prose is propelled to a torrential rhythm. Her sentences can be as long as three pages, testing the limits of the responsible deployment of semicolons. Melchor’s stylistic flexibility is something to behold if Sophie Hughes’s daunting translation is anything to go by. She can switch with impressive fluidity from precise narrative exposition to crude colloquialism to spare witness statement. My own reading was focused on keeping track of the narrative rather than the striking images, though a few still stuck out — such as the description of a dead baby “with a tiny head like a custard apple.” Hughes’s translation makes unilingual types such as myself woeful from how much of Melchor’s Spanish is lost, but Hughes’s effort to retain the original’s fury gives her a considerable share in this work.
Yet Melchor’s brutality is clear in any language. Her characters are vulgar, sardonic, nihilistic, desperate, cynical, and casually racist. More significantly, though, they are all fraught with superstition. Parents believe their children to be possessed. A priest celebrates Mass to ward off the region’s fixation on the occult. A character remembers his grandmother cleansing him after walking over an evil “work” buried in a neighbor’s yard. Another character, an accomplice to the murder, encounters a black cat while rummaging through the Witch’s house and is convinced it is “the devil incarnate, the devil who’d been following him all those years, the devil who had finally come to carry him into hell.”
The presence of superstition is not an atmospheric embellishment or a way of making the text “magical” — this book is far too cynical to abide magic. It is more of an anthropological fact, a product of “the African roots of those who lived there, and the idolatrous customs of the Indians” (not to mention the Catholicism that at once counters and fuses with those roots and customs) as well as “of all the poverty, destitution and ignorance” of the village. The La Matosa of the novel is a place where authority is less real than the occult and malevolent when not altogether absent.
Hurricane Season has been described as “nightmarish realism,” which removes it from the high modernism of Faulkner and places it closer to such Spanish language classics as Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames or Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan’s Tyrant Banderas. Of course, “nightmarish realism” goes by a different name north of the border: noir. To some American readers, the excesses of Hurricane Season might prove too challenging or exhausting. At its worst, the novel can read as if Kids were touched up by Peter Sotos. But its intensity echoes that which confronted American readers in the Depression and postwar eras in such novels as Red Harvest, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killer Inside Me, and In a Lonely Place. These are works that have endured in spite of literary taste and have hardly diminished in their intensity.
Like Melchor’s novel, these North American classics are uncompromising depictions of real social conditions told through the contorting subjectivity of the characters stuck within them. Reality was not merely a fact but an antagonist, which could only be articulated through extreme language and responded to with a morality that was expedient at best. These works took the scenic route to literary prestige, initially attracting controversy and interest that was more voyeuristic than aesthetic. Hurricane Season, being introduced into a country whose knowledge of its neighbors on either side is scant to the point of embarrassment, seems primed to run this same gauntlet. But should it come out on the other side, it will have done so on its own terms, its ferocity as intact as that of its peers.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
