Skilfully translated by Sophie Hughes, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season revolves around the murder of a stigmatised and outcast member of a small town, La Matosa in Mexico. As she meanders through the lives of the individuals surrounding the case, she gradually builds a picture not only of the circumstances surrounding the crime, but the ever-worsening climate of drug-filled austerity and misogyny in the small town.
Melchor spins a spider’s web of interconnected lives surrounding the murder, each explored in intricate detail. Her beautiful, meandering prose threatens to bury you in its paragraph length sentences, however, the strong, emotional voice of each character carries you through. While the intricate detail almost lost me at first, each is an imperative piece building up a picture of the lives of the inhabitants of La Matosa, filled with bitterness and anger. The central murder mystery surrounding a mysterious figure holds an anchor for the reader while the undercurrent of austerity in the wider context of the town is explored, like meandering tertiaries branching out from a river.
The novel begins with a classic coming-of-age scene, a recurring theme in the novel as children come of age by way of murder, drugs, and sex, trying to fit in and hunt for the next kick to escape their poverty-stricken lifestyle. As the details of the crime and the lives around it emerged, I found myself almost forgetting that the murderers in the novel are merely children, products of a hopeless environment where boys and girls of thirteen marry, rape and engage in prostitution and drugs to escape.
‘He did evil, evil things to girls […] The important thing was that Norma understood that she must never, ever get into that pickup, or go to the police, because [they] were basically the same thing.’
This sense of entrapment becomes stronger as the novel progresses, as many find themselves turning to prostitution to scrape by. Outdated moral codes cause backstreet abortions as young girls are groomed within their homes, left with unwanted pregnancies and nowhere to turn but to the fabled Witch, who can empty a woman’s belly with a simple but dangerous potion. The novel is littered with shocking brutality towards women; rape and violence are commonplace and women have nowhere to turn but to the arms of another, hopefully less violent man. Currently in Mexico, unspeakable violent crimes towards women, known as femicides, are at an all-time high, and yet remain glossed over by political leaders. Melchor’s novel delves into this abandonment of women and the surrounding sense of danger, while the men in the novel carry within themselves a strange bitterness and distrust towards women, a clear divide in gender and understanding.
‘See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole.’
This beautifully written but gritty novel leaves you with a sense of the hurricane of chaos the inhabitants of this town in Mexico are doomed to remain within. While the prose was inaccessible at first, I soon settled into the long, cyclical sentences and explored the poverty, violence, and old-fashioned morals and fables that govern lives of those in a Mexican town dragged into the 21st Century. Unlike anything I have read before, I remain haunted by the tales and experiences explored in a whirlpool of uniquely written prose.
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