hurricane season fernanda melchor review

Just as important as what occurs is its setting, a dead-end town where there are few opportunities for work, education or self-betterment. Hurricane Season is an impressive, mesmerising work, a novel using a murder as the focal point around which the writer constructs a damning indictment of a society with no hope. This is a backwater forgotten and abandoned by mainstream society, and there are far more stories out there waiting to be told. Gradually, however, we realise that while the story seems to be one of an horrific murder, in truth, it’s a broader, far more sinister tale.

Once the initial set-up is done, we’re provided with accounts by four of the townsfolk, each one bringing us closer to the fateful hour of the witch’s death. We’ll have to wait a while for all that, though, as truth emerges in rather fragmented fashion in the Mexican provinces. What the next couple of hundred pages will explore are the circumstances surrounding the murder, and (of course) the reasons for it. The identity of this corpse is no mystery, with the boys immediately identifying it as that of the Witch, an outsider living in a big, run-down house just outside town. Hurricane Season is a book that starts with a bang, in the form of five boys playing by the river, and a gruesome discovery they make:īut the ringleader pointed to the edge of the cattle track, and all five of them, crawling along the dry grass, all five of them packed together in a single body, all five of them surrounded by blowflies, finally recognised what was peeping out from the yellow foam on the water’s surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling. (I read a review copy of the Australian edition, courtesy of Text Publishing)

– Fitzcarraldo Editions, translated by Sophie Hughes Today’s destination doesn’t have much going for it, and when people are stuck in the middle of nowhere with little money, and even less to do, you can be sure that there’s tragedy just around the corner… However, anyone expecting some bucolic tranquillity has another think coming. As you may recall, our previous stop took us to a small village in Iran, and today’s trip sees us heading off to the countryside again, this time in Mexico. After the last week on the blog was spent looking at a writer who may well pop up on next year’s International Booker Prize longlist, it’s time to get back to this year’s selection, with five more stops to make on our literary travels before the end of the journey.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor review