In Mexico, from five to ten women are murdered every day. As of the middle of March, nearly 400 women have been killed in 2020 alone. The number of convictions, though, or even arrests, is so dismally low that, as activists have stated, murderers kill with “near total impunity.” Recently, the slayings of Ingrid Escamilla and 7-year old Fátima Aldrighett have renewed an outraged attention to this long-running horror. Between 1993 and 2005, hundreds of women’s bodies were found mutilated and disfigured in Ciudad Juárez, which drew international condemnation and was the source of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, which described in precise detail the physical state of dozens of corpses found in the area. Now, nearly two decades on comes Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, which also deals with the femicides in Mexico but focuses its brutally exacting eye on a single case.
Her name is the Witch, a moniker used by friend and foe alike. In the sparsely populated village of La Matosa, the Witch wears numerous cultural hats: she is a social pariah, an urban legend, a haunting ghost, a source for drugs, an outlet for taboo sexual desires, and a target of deep-seated misogyny and homophobia. The novel, Melchor’s first, opens with the discovery of the Witch’s body and proceeds to examine the myriad circumstances surrounding and multiple causes of her murder. Melchor’s uncompromising vision demonstrates how pervasive and multifaceted the culture of violence has become. It takes the entirety of a novel with various narrators to unpack the forces behind the killing of one of thousands of women.
Hurricane Season begins, appropriately, with boys. Here is the first line: “They reached the canal along the track leading up from the river, their slingshots drawn for battle and their eyes squinting, almost stitched together, in the midday glare.” These boys, mere children, are already immersed in a culture of violence, ready for some imaginary battle their world tells them to prepare for. None of them “would dare admit he was scared,” as the others, even if they were afraid, would make merciless fun of him. These boys are the ones who find the Witch’s body.
What follows from this discovery are chapters with no paragraph breaks and long, winding periodic sentences, some of which go on for pages. Melchor’s style is remarkably sure-footed and maximalist in a mostly managed way. Commenting on her work requires lengthy block quotes, but because her prose will appeal to smaller segment of the reading world than a standard murder mystery, consider these citations as a hint of what it’s like to read Melchor’s controlled cascades of syntactical bravado. Here’s an example of Melchor’s linguistic deluge:
“She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the Witch [the mother, who is also known as the Witch] wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even just to sit still under the table so that she could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their sniveling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway, and why’d they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d sob, what was the point of it all, they’d moan, they might as well be dead, just call it a day, wished they’d never been born, and with the corner of their shawls they’d dry the tears from their faces, which they covered in any case the moment they left the Witch’s kitchen, because they weren’t about to give those bigmouths in town the satisfaction of going around saying how they’d been to see the Witch to plot their revenge against so-and-so, how they’d put a curse on the slut leading their husband astray, because there was always one, always some miserable bitch in town spinning yarns about the girls who, quite innocently, minding their own business, went to the Witch’s for a remedy for indigestion, for that dipshit at home clogged up to his nuts on the extra-large bag of chips he ate in one sitting, or a tea to keep tiredness at bay, or an ointment for tummy troubles, or, let’s be honest, just to sit there a while and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats.”
Such sentences comprise much of the novel, unceasing cascades of mixed dictions and shifting POVs. Melchor doesn’t use quotation marks, so when the third-person limited style contains a few actual quotes (“just when I got my hopes up”), the distinction between the two exists only in voice, which means that a single sentence may have many styles and points of view and voices at once. The excerpt above has first-, third-, and even collective second-person pronouns (the last of which can be found in the colloquialism “let’s be honest”).
For example, in a chapter near the middle of the book, a character named Munra’s third-person limited vantage moves into a police procedural, like this:
“Munra looked at the fuel gage and thought that the most sensible thing would be to drive back to La Matosa and ask Doña Concha to put a liter of aguardiente on his tab and drink the whole thing in bed while he waited for Chabela to get home, drink until he passed out or died, whichever came first, and just then his telephone buzzed again and, once again, it was the kid, now telling him that he’d got hold of some cash, that he’d spot Munra’s gas if he did him this one solid of taking him to a job, by which the witness understood that his stepson had required the services of taking him to a specified location where he could obtain the money to continue drinking, a proposal the witness accepted …”
The sentence continues, but the above segment is enough to see the abrupt shift from Munra’s perspective and that of some official police document — suddenly Munra is no longer Munra but “the witness.” But that’s not the last shift in this section. Less than a page later, this transition occurs:
“… together, they — namely, Luismi, Brando, and Willy — also consumed psychotropic pills — the make of which the witness does not know—until two in the afternoon, at which point his stepson asked if he was gonna do him that solid, and I told him I was out of gas, that he had to give me the money first, and that’s when I realized that Brando was the one with the cash …”
The POV shifts from the police procedural language to a direct first-person narrator. And there’s even more, a page later (in fact in the very next sentence):
“… Luismi didn’t say a word but I noticed he was really edgy, that both of them were on edge and hardly even seemed drunk now, and I thought that was pretty weird but I didn’t say anything, and so basically they left, and it was a while before Munra noticed that one of them had taken his crutch, and when he looked in the rear view mirror the two kids had already gone around the side of the house to enter by the kitchen door—that’s the same entrance the witness had once used, the one and only time in his life, over eight years ago, back when Munra still had his motorcycle, before the accident.”
The perspective now shifts from first- to third-person and then back to the police procedural—all in a matter of three pages.
What’s the point of bringing all this up? First, Melchor’s prose, a masterfully controlled outpouring, both demands and earns our careful attention. Second, although Melchor constructs a complex and fully realized world in Hurricane Season — the community and its denizens, by the end, teem with individuality and life — she tells her ambitious story in a circumspect manner. So in the case of Munra and the block quotes above, the shifts in POV communicate important information: Munra, the reader understands, has been caught and questioned by the police, which is significant in terms of the plot, but also in terms of the novel’s primary theme: violence. The “police” in La Matosa are not actual law enforcement officers but rather gangsters who run the town with the impunity decried by Mexican activists. Later, another character winds up in the clutches of these men, and the results are brutally violent. In hindsight, the reader understands what must have befallen Munra, who unlike the other character is innocent.
As the novel progresses, so does the violence. Physical, psychological, sexual, and mental violence permeate the work, and it’s sometimes difficult to stomach. Characters armed with equal parts prejudice and self-loathing misdirect the anger caused by pervasive abuse and a toxically masculine culture brimming with misogynistic rhetoric unto others, people in their lives who weren’t the source of their pain but are at the receiving end of its consequences. Melchor’s narrative moves all over the place temporally, winding in circles back on itself, mirroring the cycle of violence enacted by her characters. Her penetrating eye displays deep empathy for these people, even the most outwardly reprehensible of them; she doesn’t forgive their actions, but she seeks to understand them with the desperation of someone who truly appreciates the magnitude and scope of the horror, and the importance of trying, of ceaselessly trying to stop the femicides.
Temporada de huracanes was published in 2017 and is the first of Melchor’s books to be translated into English. She has also produced two works of non-fiction based on her work as a journalist. Her translator, Sophie Hughes, has thoroughly met the challenges presented by Melchor’s spiraling, vigorous prose.
Hurricane Season is decidedly political but only in its moral implications — Melchor’s advocacy isn’t the big-picture sort of Bolaño’s 2666. Rather, it is the kind that grabs you by the wrist, yanks you toward a darkened spot of the world, shines a light on it, points at it and says: Look at what this light shows you. Look how trapped these people are in their circumstances. Look how many factors contribute to the murder of one woman. Look how these things are so intricately embedded into this culture that it may seem impossible to unravel. Look how this woman suffers because of the unrestrained toxicity of men. Look at this horror. Now imagine it happening everywhere.
[Published by New Directions on March 31, 2020, 224 pages, hardcover]