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johnreadsthings 's review for:
Hurricane Season
by Fernanda Melchor
“They say the place is hot, that it won't be long before they send in the marines to restore order in the region. They say the heat's driven the locals crazy, that it's not normal—May and not a single drop of rain—and that the hurricane season's coming hard, that it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all that bleakness: decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled-up, bagged-up bodies dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town.”
The Witch is dead and it exposed the cruelty, violence, and moral corruption in La Matosa and the characters tangentially involved in the murder. Sophie Hughes' clear translation strongly channelled Fernanda Melchor's raging hurricane-like writing in this novel. It was an impressive delve on the common-place depravity that occurs on a poverty-striken small village where its resident resort to prostitution, drugs, and crime just to get by one day after another. Always the central character to the stories, the Witch became representation of the twisted hope and solace these people in the village of La Matosa had from all the real-life violence happening in their lives, of which they had become used to. The Witch's mysterious power and wealth is as fictional and as protective as the superstition that commonly ruled villages like La Matosa. And her demise saw these people become consumed utterly by that same ugliness they have already became numbed to.
Aside from the explicit happenings in the novel—extremely graphic depiction of murder and sexual assault and other crimes—the lack of paragraph breaks in one chapter that run for an average of 20 pages and the long, winding passages made reading Hurricane Season difficult. Each chapter is a meandering train of thoughts by the narrator for that part, which created these incredibly real and colorful characters in the story, with all their desires and hopes and demons exposed completely in a huge block of one continuous paragraph. In a way, the book resembles that of a short story collection, featuring all the characters involved in a single, defining event that served as the catalyst of the story. If not for the tale itself, this unique writing style is a feat for both Melchor and Hughes.
Hurricane Season inadvertently reminded me of Eka Kurniawan's Beauty is a Wound and of my own country, and of the news presented in digestible bite-sized information every evening that bore a far more sinister background that the news outlet dare say. The common ground between these three are the poverty and the corruption that ruled all the involved people's lives. And with the Witch dead, we'd be sinking and drenched in the torrential, unrelenting, and devastating hurricane season.
The Witch is dead and it exposed the cruelty, violence, and moral corruption in La Matosa and the characters tangentially involved in the murder. Sophie Hughes' clear translation strongly channelled Fernanda Melchor's raging hurricane-like writing in this novel. It was an impressive delve on the common-place depravity that occurs on a poverty-striken small village where its resident resort to prostitution, drugs, and crime just to get by one day after another. Always the central character to the stories, the Witch became representation of the twisted hope and solace these people in the village of La Matosa had from all the real-life violence happening in their lives, of which they had become used to. The Witch's mysterious power and wealth is as fictional and as protective as the superstition that commonly ruled villages like La Matosa. And her demise saw these people become consumed utterly by that same ugliness they have already became numbed to.
Aside from the explicit happenings in the novel—extremely graphic depiction of murder and sexual assault and other crimes—the lack of paragraph breaks in one chapter that run for an average of 20 pages and the long, winding passages made reading Hurricane Season difficult. Each chapter is a meandering train of thoughts by the narrator for that part, which created these incredibly real and colorful characters in the story, with all their desires and hopes and demons exposed completely in a huge block of one continuous paragraph. In a way, the book resembles that of a short story collection, featuring all the characters involved in a single, defining event that served as the catalyst of the story. If not for the tale itself, this unique writing style is a feat for both Melchor and Hughes.
Hurricane Season inadvertently reminded me of Eka Kurniawan's Beauty is a Wound and of my own country, and of the news presented in digestible bite-sized information every evening that bore a far more sinister background that the news outlet dare say. The common ground between these three are the poverty and the corruption that ruled all the involved people's lives. And with the Witch dead, we'd be sinking and drenched in the torrential, unrelenting, and devastating hurricane season.