76 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
locked herself away in the house, per-
haps out of fear of the town’s reaction,
perhaps because “she was hiding some-
thing, a secret she couldn’t let out of her
sight.” When she died, in “the year of
the landslide” (an incident invoked mo-
mentously, like a Biblical f lood), her
daughter inherited her nickname. And
now, many years later, the daughter has
turned up dead in an irrigation canal,
and nobody knows what happened.
Such is Melchor’s world. The scene
is contemporary, but the atmosphere is
unmistakably gothic; events here have
a mythic quality, and hearsay, rumor,
and gossip, filtered through the narra-
tive voice, are our only access to the am-
biguous truths of these lives. “So the
story went,” “they say,” “some say”: these
expressions drape a gauzy veil between
the characters and the reader. (“Absa-
lom, Absalom!,” with its movements
back and forth in time, and between re-
ality and perception, comes to mind.)
The result is that our relation to the vic-
tim is distanced. “Hurricane Season”
proposes that we slowly discover the
Witch—gain a fuller sense of her un-
certain identity—through the different
perspectives of the men and women
who gravitate toward her and her leg-
endary ruin of a house. The ensemble
of observers is presented both in vari-
ous group formations and, through deft
shifts in point of view and diction, as
distinctive voices.
“Hurricane Season” is built in circles,
with narrative segments starting at a
given point in the chronology and then
returning to the past and spiralling for-
ward to tell us how we got there. The
novel’s success depends on this struc-
ture: beginning with an effect and then
asking us to hunt for the cause. The ap-
proach also obviates transitional scenes,
a hazard of conventional realism. In the
acknowledgments of the novel’s Span-
ish-language original, Melchor thanks
a friend for recommending that she read
“The Autumn of the Patriarch,” and “at
just the right moment.” Melchor plainly
owes quite a bit to García Márquez’s
use of time. In the 1971 study “García
Márquez: Historia de un Deicidio,” Var-
gas Llosa evokes the temporal move-
ment of “One Hundred Years of Soli-
tude” with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s
“The Secret Agent”: “Circles, circles;
innumerable circles, concentric, ec-
centric; a coruscating whirl of circles.”
Melchor built “Hurricane Season” in
just this way. The fact that it feels like
the only way to tell this story is a mea-
sure of the book’s success.
Melchor’s characters are defeated,
dispossessed, and disenfranchised, neverin control of their own existence, al-
ways victims of violence and too often
(and too easily) turned into willing per-
petrators. The governing forces here
include deep-seated machismo and sys-
temic misogyny, and it’s virtually im-
possible to escape them. This is clear
in the case of Luismi and Brando, young
men thrust into premature manhood
by the hardships and the viciousness of
their messy lives. Like the men in the
novel, they live in fear and awe—or awe
produced by fear—of the narcos who
rule the area; their sexual lives regularly
involve rape (although they don’t call
it that), homosexual encounters filled
with ambiguity, and, in Brando’s case,
compulsive masturbation to images of
bestiality and the like. While Melchor’s
prose calls to mind “Absalom, Absa-
lom!,” the brutality of her world out-
strips even that of “Sanctuary.”
Enter Norma, a thirteen-year-old
girl who becomes pregnant after being
serially raped by her stepfather, and re-
ceives an abortifacient from the Witch.
If the Witch’s murder is the engine
that moves the novel forward, Norma’s
predicament swiftly becomes its cen-
ter, the eye of the narrative hurricane;
a novel that had been about men be-
comes a novel about what men do to
women. Norma has been trailed by men
in a pickup truck who call her names,
“clicking their tongues as if she were a
dog.” But there’s nowhere to turn for
help; when she tells Luismi about the
men, he worries that one of them is a
narco known for abducting girls, and
asks her to promise to never “go asking
the police for help, because those fuck-
ers worked for the same boss.”
The atmosphere of permanent threat,
of constant vulnerability, recalls the
fourth section of Roberto Bolaño’s
“2666,” titled “The Part About the
Crimes,” loosely based on a spate of
murders in Ciudad Juárez. But where
Bolaño looks at victims from the out-
side, relying on inventory and reitera-
tion to produce a feeling of numbness
that is itself an indictment of the rou-
tinized violence against women, Melchor
uses her sinuous sentences to inhabit
her women and impersonate her men,
granting an almost spooky knowledge
of their darkest recesses. Throw in her
peculiar awareness of superstition (“They
say she never died, because witches don’t