A Painful Love for Doomed Characters: A review of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season
“All five of them surrounded by blow flies, 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.”
*Hurricane Season uses a distinct and challenging prose format. Each chapter is composed of a single continuous paragraph. Sentences run on for many lines, stretched to the point of breaking. I have decided to use some of these stylistic devices in the format of my review, in order to emulate the feeling of the book.
The central narrative of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (translated by Sophie Hughes) revolves around the murder of ‘The Witch’ of the Mexican town of La Matosa. The story is told through a series of direct addresses. Each section of the text almost has the feeling of an interrogation, but also contains the characteristics of an immersive soliloquy. It feels almost impossible that the characters would willingly speak so candidly to any audience. You come to understand that something very strange is happening. As a reader we are lured in, made a part of the narrative itself and dragged though the story. Combined with the beautifully crafted run on sentences that form complex paragraphs with no breaks, the book is so easy to keep reading. You never want to stop, always hungry for the next line, like you are listening in rapture to a story being read aloud, desperate to find out the resolution. I read the book in one sitting and found it utterly consuming. It is upon later reflection that I come to appreciate the incredible effect of Melchor’s style of narrative delivery; when the soliloquies stray into deeply personal introspection, still with the natural bias and character perspective blindspots, the text puts the reader in the role of an omniscient judge. We are given tools that not only allow us to investigate the murder, but also the state of the individuals and society itself, as depicted by the story. It is an anguishing read. Corruption, imprisonment, denial. The crippling fear of everything that is inescapable, both inside and outside the self. The flaws in perspective, even within families, communities and especially our own minds. Our incapability to see things as they are seen by others, in this way. The reader becomes the book’s final viewpoint. Just as every narrator in the story views the events and each other from viewpoints of irreconcilable difference, every reader will similarly have their own jaded and corrupted view of the text. The book’s composition seems crafted to produce an awareness of this very natural phenomenon of reading, but the content of the narratives prompted me to think of it more seriously than I ever had before, thinking of the danger of personal corruption, the corruption of perspective. How these corrupted perspectives, each incapable of seeing the larger picture, play a part in creating the dark reality in which every character has to live. Perhaps this is Melchor’s commentary on society, a close look at how the inability of individuals within to see each other as fully human leads to pain and abuse. The book is preoccupied with terms of dehumanisation, ‘faggot,’ ‘queer,’ ‘Witch,’ and the cultural superstitions surrounding these terms. As a reader, I felt the conspicuous absence of a unifying view, as if the book was saying ‘there is nobody to see us any other way, to see our flaws and misconceptions from outside and tie together our narratives into a human whole.’ The characters are doomed to live inside the jaded confusion of their individual perspectives, damaged and repressed, with no way out; both lost and trapped, until the reader sees them, but what can we do? I found the narrative of Brandon, towards the end of the book, to be the most intimate exploration of this, almost like the crash of the wave which had been swelling into shore over the course of the entire story. His casual engagement in homosexual activity for base gratification, egged on by his elders but always with the implicit threat of judgement if any part of the activity should stem from some deeper element of emotion or identity, caused him to form a relationship of deep resentment and confusion with his sexuality. It corrupted his connection to his peers and made him a part of a violent cycle of abuse and repression. Brandon was the character I found the most disturbing. I was most quick to hate him, to judge him, but also found him the character I most connected with and loved against my better judgement. I think this was because by the end of his nearly 70-page section, I couldn’t help but feel like I really understood him, and once you truly understand someone it is difficult not to have some love for them. I’m catching myself thinking of these characters as real people. That’s honestly how they feel. Melchor has achieved something very special with this book, and Sophie Hughes’ English translation is something for which I’m so grateful, for giving me the opportunity to read such an incredible story. There is no way I can say everything I’m feeling about this book in a short review. It makes me profoundly sad, and it’s my favourite book from the 2020 International Booker Prize Shortlist so far. This is highly recommended, but not for the shy or anyone who is afraid of the darker parts of themselves. For those who can accept the disturbing content, there is something special between these pages, please come and discover it for yourselves.
by Jasper Evans