New today at Splice, I’m reviewing Fernanda Melchor’s blistering novel Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes:
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is a novel about the threshing machine of politics in the lives of people who struggle to recognise it as such, much less to name and discuss it, though they absolutely register its effects on their experiences. While the novel is Melchor’s third, it’s her first to be made available in English, in a fierce and forceful translation by Sophie Hughes, and every word bristles with indignation at the politics in which its characters are immured. Not the bickering of spin doctors, not the argy-bargy of international delegates, not the supplications of diplomats or the pontifications of op-ed blowhards. Hurricane Season maintains a tight focus on just one tiny village in Mexico, a superstitious place blighted by “poverty, destitution and ignorance”, and page by page it forensically examines the daily deprivations of the townsfolk. The picture is unremittingly bleak. La Matosa is the kind of place where a grown man can remain haunted by memories of finding “a work of witchcraft” outside his boyhood home, “one of those extra-large mayonnaise jars with an immense toad floating inside, a dead, decomposed toad swimming in a murky liquid”. It’s also a place where the family of an asthmatic child try to help him survive the winter by blanketing his bed with clothes, and bathing him in the feeble warmth of a lightbulb, only to wake up one morning and find that he has died in his sleep. What hope for future generations when material resources are insufficient and the black arts are taken to be a greater cause for concern?
Infinite Patience 