Hurricane Season

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, tr. Sophie Hughes

The rundown: A group of villagers discover the Witch’s corpse, face stuck in a rictus grin, in a canal. The events culminating in her death are unfurled slowly through the points of view of five villagers.

The review: This is the kind of book that hurts going down. Hurricane Season is a raging torrent of linguistic and material violence, and it is glorious. The book begins with the discovery of the Witch’s corpse in a canal, and the central mystery of her death unravels piecemeal through a kaleidoscope of several unreliable narrators’ points-of-view of the events leading up to her murder. 

Each character is connected to the Witch in some way, and each struggles through their own version of hell in the poverty-stricken coastal Mexican village where they eke out the barest facsimile of living. Their existence is saturated in violence; they are subjected to it, and they enact it. 

But Melchor makes it clear that patriarchy and late-capitalist strictures are the root causes of the hyperviolent conditions faced by her characters. The book opens with  gendered violence against the Witch, whose non-traditional gender makes her even more hated, and the male characters all demonstrate rampant, violent homophobia even as they engage in homosexual acts themselves. The desperate poverty is the result of oppressive socioeconomic systems, most notably symbolized by the highway that connects the village to nearby oil fields that brings the Oil Company more profit but brings only more harm to La Matosa. An economic ideology - beginning with the Witch’s decision to discontinue her mother’s practice of bartering with village women for her services and instead charging them, with interest - warps many of the relationships in the novel. The “brain-frying heat” and unusual lack of rain, presumably consequences of climate change, lending a stifling feel to an already stomach-churning tale.

Melchor seems to languish in the hopeless, nearly apocalyptic inevitability of existence under capitalism. It is impossible to imagine any other type of life, and any of her characters who try to do so, ultimately fail. None of them overcome their circumstances; death is the only escape.

Goes well with: Is it cheating to say that you should read Melchor’s other translated works next? I don’t think so - her writing is so distinct that it’s hard to recommend anything else as a follow-up read. So, borrow Paradais next and then make your way to This Is Not Miami.