by Philip Gambone

Everyone has a theory as to why the people of La Matosa have gone so crazy. It's the heat, they say, not a single drop of rain. Then, too, there's the coming hurricane season, which brings its own bad vibes. That's what's causing all the bleakness, the murders, the rapes. Or perhaps it's the rumor of an enormous treasure hidden in the local Witch's house—gold, silver, diamonds—everyone in a frenzy, wanting to get at that bitch's secret wealth. But the women of this godforsaken town know better. Gathered on their porches, smoking their filterless cigarettes, blowing the smoke over their babies' faces to keep the mosquitoes away, they know that the craziness stems from nothing more than "a searing pain that refuses to go away."

Pain—the pain of poverty, of broken families, of corruption, of machismo, of lives devoid of purpose—this is the utterly bleak landscape in which the young and very talented Mexican writer, Fernanda Melchor, sets her stunning novel, Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season). Melchor's fictional town of La Matosa is a place overrun by hookers and tramps, "lured by the trail of money that the oil trucks have left in their wake." It's a town where the women endure the brutality of their husbands and partners, "drunks and deadbeats, a pack of dogs, shameless pigs." The few decent women spend their lives either "in church or glued to the tv screen watching soap operas or reading celebrity magazines."

Like her debut book This is Not Miami, which looked squarely and unflinchingly at the broken social fabric of Veracruz (see my "The Dirty Realism of Fernanda Melchor," Lokkal, November 17, 2024), Melchor originally intended Hurricane Season to be another work of hard-hitting nonfiction. In fact, the book is based on a true murder, but Melchor decided that publishing a nonfiction account of that crime would be too risky. She reworked the story as a novel. The result is a book remarkable for its graphic candor, its stylistic audacity, and its ability to make us see the humanity and complexity of each character, even the vilest ones.

"In every narrative," Melchor once told an interviewer, "there must be an exploration of the human soul. If someone wants to tell a story, they must have characters … that the reader can see in three dimensions, that is, not just the bad or good of them, since making them human implies presenting them with all their nuances."

In each of the novel's eight unparagraphed chapters, Melchor gives us another take on what was behind the brutal murder of the Witch, whose body is discovered in a canal by a group of children. "The novel is a chorus of voices that tells the crime in a circular fashion," Melchor has said. "I wanted to explore what happens in the hearts of people who find themselves in the environment where a crime of passion takes place, what happens when a murder occurs, what lies behind it, the stories that emerge from it, and how it is made possible in a marginalized environment."

The Witch (from the Netflix film of the novel)
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As much as it is a crime novel, Hurricane Season is also a candid and gutsy story about the persistent social dysfunction in poverty-stricken Mexico. The men of La Matosa view women and girls as good for only one thing. "Why get all bent out of shape," one guy cynically asks the mother of a pregnant girl, "when that's just the way the world works." Meanwhile, the women, who time and again acquiesce to the men's desire, end up full of self-loathing.

We come to learn that the Witch performed a complex function in the town. For the boys and men, she hosted parties that allowed for passions otherwise repressed. Meanwhile, the women visit her to seek remedies for indigestion or just "to sit there a while and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats."

The Witch's brazen and unapologetically transgressive behavior is a challenge to the townspeople, especially the sexually repressed men, who numb their pain and terror in booze, drugs, prostitution, and violence. These men, one character says, "so easy to love but so hard to understand, to reach."

Melchor populates her novel with a cast of vivid, rough, tormented characters: Yesenia, full of rage that her freeloader cousin, Luismi, has their grandmother wrapped around his little finger. Chabela, Luismi's mother, who's seen it all and now only counts on the money to be made in the game of love. "All you need is a tidy ass," she says. Brando, erotically obsessed with Luismi and terrified he will be thought of as a homosexual. Good-looking Pepe, who has biceps that he can flex until the stitching on his t-shirt bursts and who tells his underage girlfriend Norma that he's just trying to show her the love she never felt from a father. And Norma, confused and terrified, who hopes the Witch can help her with an abortion.

Melchor delivers scene after scene—backstreet abortions, police interrogations, prison brutality, Carnival festivities, orgies at the Witch's—with an amazing, often disquieting literary wallop. This is not a novel for the squeamish or those easily offended by raw vocabulary. Hurricane Season is Rebel Without a Cause on steroids.

For those who like their Mexican novels "lite," Fernanda Melchor may not be your shot of tequila. But there is no question that she is a talent to be reckoned with. Not yet 45, she has already garnered a host of important awards including the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the Pen Club Prize for Journalistic and Literary Excellence. Hurricane Season won the Anna Seghers Preis and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award.

"Through writing," Melchor once said, "I hope to evoke emotions in my readers and, through them, humanize and try to give weight and dimension to the tragedy we are experiencing not only in Veracruz, but throughout Mexico." In both her fiction and her nonfiction, she succeeds brilliantly in this pursuit.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, is available on Amazon, the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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