THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 75
BOOKS
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
A Mexican novelist explores how misogyny turns murderous.
BYJUAN GABRIELVÁSQUEZ
ILLUSTRATION BY APOLO CACHO
I
n September of 1967, Gabriel García
Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa,
perhaps the greatest Latin American
novelists of the twentieth century, met
twice in Lima, Peru, to talk about lit-
erature in front of a university audience.
In the middle of one conversation, after
discussing questions as diverse as the
origins of “One Hundred Years of Sol-
itude” and the political commitment of
the novelist, Vargas Llosa asked García
Márquez about William Faulkner and
his influence on Latin American liter-
ature. “I think it’s the method,” García
Márquez said. “The Faulknerian method
is very effective in narrating Latin Amer-
ican reality.... This is not strange at all,
because I’m not forgetting that Yokna-
patawpha County borders the Carib-
bean Sea.”
Actually, Yoknapatawpha County
would appear to be landlocked, at least
according to a hand-drawn map that
Faulkner published in 1936. But the
geographical mistake is beautifully el-
oquent: for decades, Latin American
novelists have claimed Faulkner as one
of their own, finding in his fiction—
in its exploration of a problematic his-
tory, in its use of lore and myth, in its
formal inventiveness—a key to the in-
terpretation of their world. That’s ev-
ident in the Mexican novelist Fernanda
Melchor’s astonishing “Hurricane Sea-
son,” which, in 2020, became her first
novel to appear in English, and now
in its successor, “Paradais” (New Di-
rections), both translated by Sophie
Hughes. With a nimble command of
the novel’s technical resources and an
uncanny grasp of the irrational forces
at work in society, the books navigate
a reality riven by violence, race, class,
and sex. And they establish Melchor,
who was born in 1982, as the latest of
Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors,
and among the most formidable.
“Hurricane Season” is a taut novel
with chapter-length paragraphs of re-
lentless, serpentine prose and a claus-
trophobic intensity barely mitigated by
the open spaces where the action oc-
curs—a scattering of shacks built amid
cane fields near a port city modelled
on Veracruz. The inhabitants live in
squalor, moral as well as physical. Pros-
titution and drug dealing are part of
the daily grind, and Melchor paints a
hellscape of distrust, venality, private
aggressions, and general grimness. The
novel begins with a group of roaming
children—“their slingshots drawn for
battle and their eyes squinting, almost
stitched together, in the midday glare”—
who are about to come upon a body.
Melchor’s prose is muscular but always
attentive to the world of the senses and
carried forward by an impeccable ear.
(Hughes sticks close in her agile ren-
dering, riding an untamed beast and
staying in the saddle.) The chapter
closes with an arresting image:
The ringleader pointed to the end of the
cattle track, and all five of them, crawling along
the dry grass, all five of them packed together
in a single body, all five of them surrounded
by blowflies, finally recognized what was peep-
ing out from the yellow foam on the water’s
surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating
among the rushes and the plastic bags swept
in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask
seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.
We learn that the body is that of a
local woman who was known as the
Witch, just as her mother had been; we
learn about her mother’s dealings with
the town, the curses she conjured and
the poisons she concocted from herbs;
we learn about the rumor that the
mother killed her husband, a landowner
straight out of Faulkner’s “Sartoris” saga,
who died before he could finish build-
Fernanda Melchor unsparingly traces the spirals of vulnerability and violence. ing his own house. Once widowed, she
