hurricane season fernanda melchor review

Melchor's long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. 'A brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn't just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, New York Review of Books Sophie Hughes's translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang so impressively that one wonders whether the harsher sounds of English in fact suit the novel better.' This is an effect of the structure of the novel as much as of its writing. ' Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story-its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor's prose Melchor's kaleidoscope keeps circling around the untold source of the horrors, and we are increasingly keen to unveil it. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings. Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices. ' Hurricane Season is a Gulf Coast noir from four characters' perspectives, each circling a murder more closely than the last. Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream 'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.' Avni Doshi, Guardian Best Books of 2020

'A sprawling, heaving thing, and I loved it because I have no idea how Fernanda Melchor was able to write it. Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, Hurricane Season, Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes.

As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. About the Book Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes.īook Synopsis The Witch is dead.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor review