hurricane season fernanda melchor review

Originally conceived as an In Cold Blood-style literary investigation, Hurricane Season takes the violence that has devastated Veracruz, and delves into inner lives of its perpetrators. Melchor’s subject stems from a series of real-life murders. La Matosa is a fictional village in Veracruz, a part of Mexico that is often ignored as the cultural fixation falls on the metropolis of Mexico City, or the narcos of the US border. Beyond the focus on a single instance of femicide, Hurricane Season captures, through its torrential prose and unbroken paragraphs, the sexual terrorism committed by men and the ways in which they terrorise each other. Borne out of a series of gradual confessions, these narratives coalesce to produce a cacophony of voices, shedding light and more often darkness upon what has already unfolded. Her corpse is discovered in a canal on the opening page by five boys who see her face ‘seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.’ The novel’s chronology alternates between perspectives which outline who the Witch was and why she was murdered. Hurricane Season tells the tale of Norma amidst a cast of characters, whose collective testimonies shed light upon the murder of the Witch. After fleeing her family home, Norma eventually seeks out the Witch.

She lives alone and helps the women of La Matosa get rid of their Sunday sevens through homemade abortion solutions. But on the edge of town, surrounded by cane fields, there is a Witch. In the village of La Matosa, the setting of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes, such hexes and magic do not exist. A greedy hunchbacked man attempts to complete their song by shouting ‘ SUNDAY SEVEN!’ in hope of some reward, only for the outraged witches to hex him by conjuring another hunch upon his stomach. In a ripped copy of Fairy Tales for Children of All Ages, Norma reads about a coven of witches who chant their song into the night, ‘ Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, three Thursday and Friday and Saturday, six’. So it had finally happened, she thought, horrified: the fateful Sunday seven that would ruin her life and the lives of her entire family.’ Norma initially thinks the phrase might refer to getting her period: ‘on the toilet she discovered her knickers were stained with blood, a maroon, putrid blood that came out of precisely the same hole Pepe had been poking around in lately. At home she has often been told that it is a terrible thing. One day, on her way home from school, Norma, a pregnant 13-year-old who is groomed and sexually abused by her stepfather, discovers in a book of fairy tales where the phrase ‘Sunday seven’ comes from.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor review