Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MEL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MEL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse--by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals--propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or Faulkner's greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence--real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.
Author Notes
Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982,Fernanda Melchor is one of Mexico's most exciting new voices" ( The Guardian ). Her novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Sophie Hughes has translated such Spanish-language writers as Ivan Repila, Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbun, Jose Revueltas, Giuseppe Caputo, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Alia Trabucco Zeran."
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Melchor's English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town. The story opens with a group of boys discovering the body of the Witch in a canal. The Witch is a local legend: she provides the women of the town with cures and spells, while for the men she hosts wild, orgiastic parties at her house. Each chapter is a single, cascading paragraph and follows a different townsperson. First is Yesenia, a young woman who despises her addict cousin, Luismi, and one day sees him carrying the Witch from her home with another boy, Brando. Next is Munra, Luismi's stepfather, who was also present at the Witch's house; then Norma, a girl who flees her abusive stepfather and ends up briefly settling with Luismi; and lastly Brando, who finally reveals the details of the Witch's death. The murder mystery (complete with a mythical locked room in the Witch's house) is simply a springboard for Melchor to burrow into her characters' heads: their resentments, secrets, and hidden and not-so-hidden desires. Forceful, frenzied, violent, and uncompromising, Melchor's depiction of a town ogling its own destruction is a powder keg that ignites on the first page and sustains its intense, explosive heat until its final sentence. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
A structurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor's formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long. It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion - a venue for raucous parties - was said to hold a stash of gold eyed up by everyone from down-at-heel gigolos to venal cops on the take. In vigorous, earthy language (Sophie Hughes's resourceful translation raids US and British slang for what you guess must be a pretty creative repertoire of curses and epithets), we're plunged into the chaotic lives of several villagers in the Witch's orbit, including druggy layabout Luismi, seen leaving her home the morning her body was found; his pal Brando, tormented by secret lust; and his lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather's baby. What follows is a brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn't just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Melchor's long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. The object isn't clarity, but complication: the Witch, it turns out, might actually be a man and there are three of them. The near-dystopian onslaught of horror and squalor leaves you dumbstruck, as Melchor shows us the desperation of girls cruelly denied their ambitions, railroaded into household service or worse, and the depravity of boys for whom desire comes fatally muddled with power and humiliation. It's telling that the only characters with any real measure of control - a police chief and a narco boss, morally indistinguishable - are the only ones from whose perspective Melchor never writes. While there's no shortage of ugly moments, including the hinted-at contents of a viral video showing the fate of an abducted child, it's often the smallest details that testify to how thoroughly Melchor has inhabited her often appalling material: at one point, Norma, unsure why she's feeling sick in the morning, finds herself even less able than usual to tolerate the smell of her regular bedmate, a younger brother who can't wipe his own bottom properly. Melchor has said that she originally conceived of Hurricane Season as a nonfiction investigation, à la Truman Capote, of a real life murder that took place in a village near her hometown of Veracruz, changing tack once she reconsidered the hazards of poking around a narco-inhabited locale as a stranger. If she has any ethical doubts about the project, she keeps them to herself; this is fiction with the brakes off. Not an Oprah book club pick, one suspects, but not a novel to be missed - if you can steel yourself.
Kirkus Review
A dead Witch in a Mexican village prompts a host of locals to share rumors and memories of her checkered life and violent death.Mexican writer Melchor's first book published in English is remarkable for the sheer force of its language. Its eight chapters are each one paragraph long, and they're usually very long paragraphs, often constructed of page- or pages-long sentences. The format gives the impression that we're occupying the space of a host of characters who'll brook no interruption, even if their storytelling is lurid, digressive, and/or unreliable. But all agree that a bad thing has happened: The corpse of a local Witch who trades in "curses and cures" has been discovered floating in an irrigation canal, "seething under a myriad of black snakes." The chapters that follow attempt to fill out the backstory: She allegedly killed her husband and cursed his sons, hexed relationships over money, might actually be a man, delivered abortions, and provided a druggy and boozy safe haven for young gay men. What's true or not matters less than the Witch's role as the village scapegoat, the person upon whom everyone places their shames and secrets. Two virtuoso chapters underscore the depth of feeling and disquieting intensity Melchor is capable of, one turning on a girl impregnated by her stepfather and the blame and embarrassment rained upon her, the other about a closeted young man in a Bosch-ian milieu that takes byways into drugs, violence, and bestiality porn. It's tough stuff but not gratuitously so: The narrative moves so fast the slurs and gross-outs feel less like attempts to shock and more like the infrastructure of a place built on rage and transgression. The place is suffused with "bad vibes, jinxes...bleakness." Whether the Witch was its creator or firewall is an open question.Messy yet engrossingly feverish. Melchor has deep reserves of talent and nerve. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Melchor suffuses the realities of life in a small Mexican village with dark, mythic undertones in her exhilarating and propulsive English-language debut. In La Matosa, the jobs are scarce and what little economy exists comes primarily from sex and drugs and providing both to workers of the surrounding cane and oil fields. Poverty, exploitation, and violence, however, are in unabated abundance. Folkloric themes swirl around the character of The Witch, whose violent death is told through multiple perspectives in novella-length sections, each consisting of a single paragraph ranging in length from one to 64 pages relayed by narrators of varying reliability. The virtuosic display of hyper-literary prose is a whirlwind of curses, dark humor, mythology, profanity, and folk wisdom that gathers speed in an unrelenting barrage of brilliance and leaves the reader breathless and marveling at the accomplishment. The depictions of violence, particularly those perpetrated upon women and gay and trans characters are graphic but not gratuitous and in Melchor's assured voice, often feel like reportage rather than fiction. Notably, The Witch's perspective is not shared, suggesting the marginalization of vulnerable populations and that silence is itself a form of violence. This bravura work blends reality with horror, myth with truth, and while the writing is magical, it is the realism that punctures the heart. Echoing the book's epigraph from Yeats, this is a work "of terrible beauty."
