![]() In the second chapter we learn there are actually two Witches, mother and daughter, one dead, one alive, but in the flurry it is easy to lose track of who is who. ![]() Narrators offer uninhibited responses, justifications, and observations, while also occluding important connective information. It’s a technique suited to her architecture of disorientation. ![]() Melchor writes in a third person that warps without warning into first then back to third. Discovered by five boys wading through a canal, she lies floating beneath a “myriad of black snakes, smiling.” From there the next seven chapters crackle, each taking on the furious perspective of a new narrator who offers his or her own insights about the murder and, more importantly, the village where it happened. Even so, I turned its final page after only a few sittings. I could barely see through the imagery, which is torrential yet constantly vivid. Sentences are pages long, and the ones that are not are often fragments. More than once did I consider abandoning Hurricane Season (224 pages New Directions translated by Sophia Hughes), Fernanda Melchor’s first novel. ![]()
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