{"id":827,"date":"2025-01-28T09:59:28","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T09:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/mountaindevil\/?p=827"},"modified":"2025-01-31T22:41:08","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T22:41:08","slug":"hurricane-season-fernanda-melchor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/?p=827","title":{"rendered":"Hurricane Season \u2013 Fernanda Melchor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recommend: No (but do read her other novel, Paradais<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are countless books that make you dream of living somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Call Me By Your Name\u2019<\/em>s youthful Italian summer leaves a yearning for a breakfast of juicy peaches in Tuscany. Cold Enough For Snow<\/em> allows time for cold but honest reflection in the foreign sparseness of a Japanese ryokan. Even A Book Of Common Prayer<\/em> shows the allure of fictional Boca Grande, suspended somewhere in South America, where history and the future blend together in the tropical heat to form a vaporous escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fernanda Melchor, however, is intent for Mexico to be scratched off any Gourmet Traveller lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both Hurricane Season<\/em> and her later novel, Paradais<\/em>, she depicts a Mexico that is brutal, sexist and motivated entirely by money or sexual violence (or both).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hurricane Season<\/em> was her first novel translated in English but I am reading it out of order. I began with Paradais<\/em> last year. The plots of both are roughly similar: there is a horrific murder of a female figure at the hands of young men. In Paradais <\/em>drug cartels feature more prominently but they\u2019re there in the background of Hurricane Season <\/em>too. In both novels there is very little to like about Mexico. Amongst the extreme violence and poverty, there are few characters that redeem themselves. You are either a psychopathic killer or a deliberately ignorant by-stander. You are either a misogynist or a victim of misogyny. You probably have a pregnant cousin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I sound dispirited, it is because Hurricane Season <\/em>didn\u2019t reach the same level of tension and humour as Paradais<\/em>. Or, more accurately, I should say Paradais<\/em> was obviously far superior, given it was written second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paradais<\/em> had an extremely tight plot. There were only three main characters: the murder victim, the murderer and the murder\u2019s accomplice. The whole narrative was from the (unreliable) perspective of the accomplice. Hurricane Season<\/em> introduces us to many, many more characters, and each chapter dedicates its focus to a different character. The timeline of Paradais<\/em> was not linear, but it was very binary: before the murder and after the murder. Hurricane Season<\/em> jumps around a lot more. A typical chapter will reference where that particular character is in the hours directly following the murder but then jump back miles in time to go through a full backstory. The characters are all tightly linked, so it\u2019s not random, but the point of emphasis moves around too much. There\u2019s a thirteen year old girl having a miscarriage, the seed of which was planted by her step-father. The antagonist is a rapscallion but also seeks out some tenderness from his homosexual flings with older men that pay him for sex. His mother is a prostitute that sort-of has the support from her cripple boyfriend. The murder victim is referred to as a Witch for much of the plot, only for it later to be revealed that she is a transvestite. It\u2019s all a bit much. I think the point is that all these characters are stuck in the rot. They are all varied people that are unified by the same stinking, inescapable rot. They are all doomed until the grave. Hardly uplifting. And not perfectly executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other area in which I found Hurricane Season <\/em>lacking was the physical surroundings. Paradais<\/em> has such a strong setting \u2013 it flicks between the titular upmarket gated community, the totally wild jungle and river, and then a concrete ghetto that sits in the middle of the jungle. Hurricane Season<\/em> doesn\u2019t have nearly as strong a sense of place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I don\u2019t recommend Hurricane Season,<\/em> it\u2019s actually filled me with a lot of happiness to see just how much Melchor honed her writing after this book. If Hurricane Season<\/em> gave birth to Paradais<\/em>, then what gem will be revealed when the skills evident in Paradais<\/em> are polished further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See there? 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}