![]() ![]() Melchor’s technical skills are wildly impressive. The events that led to The Witch’s death are narrated by a breathless chorus of voices that circle around the crime from various angles in Rashomon style. The victim is The Witch, a local pariah, daughter of a woman who took up with a land-rich man and who herself was deemed to be a sorceress after the death of her lover and his sons. ![]() ![]() The body is found on the first page, floating in an irrigation canal. ![]() It is a story of small-town homophobia set against a backdrop of government corruption, globalization and cartel violence in Mexico. In her new novel Hurricane Season (New Directions), Melchor tells us a tale as wondrously grotesque and captivating as a Bosch triptych narrated by a raunchy female Cormac McCarthy. Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor. ![]()
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