Hurricane Season

"This is a novel set in a rural Mexican village, and it opens with a very graphic, visceral scene: a body floating in a canal. We learn that this body belongs to a character called ‘The Witch,’ who is shrouded in layers of myth and misunderstanding and legend. She is variously a woman with supernatural powers, a prostitute, and a woman who is, in a sense, the keeper of community secrets. She is also the object of violence and machismo and misogyny. She is the point around which this incandescent novel swirls. Another key figure in the novel is her daughter who is referred to simply as ‘The Girl’. These women are really at the centre of this book, which moves centrifugally out towards a portrait of a whole community, and the ways in which violence and misogyny are concentrated on these bodies, on these women. There’s an infernal pace to this. This is a book of “hellacious force,” a phrase I like from the book itself. It moves in these unbroken paragraphs: eight torrential paragraphs that flow through the book. The prose moves like the extreme weather system that the title suggests. Given how intense and uncompromising the style is – like a flow of flood water, it brings everything with it; it brings swearing, it brings bureaucratized language, it brings violent slang, it brings the intimacy of family life, all of these things come flooding through these paragraphs – for any translator, this would be such an enormous challenge because of the potential for that to become an undifferentiated mass of voices. What Sophie Hughes has done superbly and with great flair and boldness, is to approximate the spirit of the original novel. She takes the incandescent spirit, this very controlled rage that the novel is wrestling with, and translates it in a way that mirrors that torrential flow, bringing with it all different kinds of Englishes with it. So it’s a book that has real bite, and it’s terse, but it also is very nimble as well."

"It does. It’s almost like free jazz or something—at its most discordant. It’s wild. I’ve just reviewed Paradais , her new one. The first time you read her, and certainly with Hurricane Season , you are just swept away, blown away by it. It’s a kind of assault. But when I read it for a second time, I was better able to see how skillfully and carefully it’s put together. She writes these long, long sentences with one clause after another after another, conveying a sort of breathlessness that’s difficult to sustain. You don’t know where to put it down. There’s no natural rest stop, other than the numbered sections. I think it shares a few links with 2666 . Obviously both books are set in Mexico, but there are also huge levels of misogyny. And structurally it’s also a sort of cubist portrait of a crime and its aftermath. There’s this local witch, maybe a transvestite, maybe non-binary, it’s left uncertain, who is a healer for local women and an abortionist—someone people go to because the local medical system is not functioning or somehow not available to them. It’s set in Veracruz, where Melchor is from, which is almost wholly given over to the narcos. There’s corruption, murder. She was actually going to write about a real-life murder—it was originally to be a true crime book—but ended up fictionalising it because it was too dangerous to go to any of these narco-controlled villages to interview people. She had to give up. In the acknowledgements, it says: To the journalists Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz and Gabriel Huge, murdered in Veracruz under the government of the vile Javier Duarte de Ochoa —who was the governor of Veracruz while she was writing the book. During that time, Veracruz was one of the top three most dangerous places for journalists on Earth. It was lethal. I think her drive to write it and the way it’s written conveys her anger and disgust at the social situation in Veracruz without her ever preaching. It’s a series of first-person narrations, so she’s not getting on a soap box at any point, you’re just living this experience through the characters and these characters are both violent abusers and those who are abused. They’re at the ugly end of the same system we live in. Their cruelties and inhumanity emerge as a sort of product of it, you can see where it comes from and so there’s never any question of outright evil, although evil deeds take place. She’s able to make you empathise with people who do terrible, terrible things. In terms of reading experience, it’s like being on a rollercoaster. It’s darkly exhilarating and utterly consuming. She achieves this at the level of the line—you strap into one of these narratives and there’s a sharp descent for 40 or 50 pages until you switch character. Then there’s a brief respite to make a cup of tea, or have a stiff drink, and then it’s straight back in. No. I just always have done, since I was a tragic 15-year-old with a Milan Kundera obsession. That’s how you say you were a teenager in the 1990s without saying you were a teenager in the 1990s. I’ve never really differentiated between fiction in translation and homegrown stuff. I can’t intellectualise it beyond that."