hurricane season (w. melchor tr. hughes)

Having read Paradais , it made sense to get to grips with Hurricane Season, which some have compared to Marquez. If this is correct, (and in this translation it doesn’t feel like it is), then it is a frightening reflection of what has happened to the Latin American literary world, and perhaps Latin America itself. In her machine gun prose, Melchor takes the killing of a trans and spins it into a golgothic voyage through a dead end Mexican pueblo. In this place, everyone is desperate, everyone is driven by venal desire, everyone will meet a cruel fate. Teenagers have miscarriages, other teenagers fantasise about fucking and killing their best friends, the elders have had all hope extinguished. There is no magic in this realism, the magic has been expunged, even the black magic has had its throat cut and died in a ditch. It’s not an easy read and there is no redemption to be found. The only thing that the characters know is that it will rain one day and they are likely to die sooner rather than later.

Although the scale of Hurricane Season is grander that of Paradais, the novel feels less nuanced. There is a reliance on the flair of the prose over and above the development of character. It is, one imagines from an editorial perspective, seductive. Long sweeping tracts of text, stepsisters to Bernhard, trampling over the Mexican littoral, delivering adrenaline shots of brutality and sexual violence. It is a representation of Mexico which mirrors one reality, whilst at the same time annulling all the others. The novel has much in common in with the section in 2666, the Part about the Crimes, without any of the framing contextualisation of Bolaño’s novel. The horror is overwhelming and restrictive, the novel peering through the narrowest of lenses at a world no-one would ever want to visit IRL. 

paradais (fernanda melchor, tr sophie hughes)

Fernanda Melchor’s short novel is another to add to the compendium of contemporary visions of a Mexico which has been scarred by violent crime. Reviewer notes at the front of the book mention 2666, but this novel feels closer to Escalante’s Heli, as a touchstone. Melchor interrogates the crudeness of a macho violent culture through two characters, Polo and Franco. Franco is the wealthy Fatboy loser who lives with his grandparents in a gated community. Polo is the young odd-job-man who Franco befriends with free alcohol. Polo despises Franco, who lusts foolishly over a middle aged neighbour, but his own desperation means he allows himself to get sucked in to Franco’s plan to rape her whilst Polo plunders. This frightful and foolish mission is described at the end of the book in pages of machine gun prose. Behind Polo’s desperation there lurks the presence of his cousin, Milton, who has been coerced by the narcos into working for them, something which has obviously destroyed Milton but which Polo envies. For Polo, Milton’s new status means money and power, whereas for Milton it clearly means moral degradation and hopelessness. This is a short, brutal novel, steeped in the evil of men and the things men do. Mexico bleeds through its pages, a Mexico where no-one is safe, even those living on a gated community, seemingly immune to the violence of the world that prowls beyond the confines of the perfect lawns and swimming pools. But most of all, Melchor represents the violence through the hopeless cynicism of Polo and Franco, two characters who are devoid of moral compass, having no need of this in a world which has no respect for morality.