#fernanda melchor

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (orig. Páradais, 2021)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onNov 26, 2025

[epigraphexhibition]

from Hurricane Season (Fernanda Melchor, 2016) [trans. Sophie Hughes, 2020]

[date-prisa-estamos-leyendo]

Dicen que en realidad nunca murió, porque las brujas nunca mueren tan fácil. Dicen que en el último momento, antes de que los muchachos aquellos la apuñalaran, ella alcanzó a lanzar un conjuro para convertirse en otra cosa: en un lagarto o un conejo que corrió a refugiarse a lo más profundo del monte. O en el milano gigante que apareció en el cielo días después del asesinato: un animal enorme que volaba en círculos sobre los sembradíos y que luego se posaba sobre las ramas de los árboles a mirar con ojos colorados a la gente que pasaba debajo, como con ganas de abrir el pico y hablarles.

Temporada de huracanes, Fernanda Melchor.

[prommethium]

Challenge:

find a stop in "Temporada de Huracanes" by Fernanda Melchor.

[wordsandthingsreviews]

Review: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

I just finished my first October 2024 read. A surprising amount of pedophilia and even a little bestiality. An intense and even grotesque meditation on despair and raging self-defiance.

Specific, but unorganized thoughts around “despair”:

Brando really hated himself and especially that he loved Luismi. SO much violence and self-hatred…such hells that everyone put themselves through. It really reversed Sartre’s line from No Exit “Hell is other people”. Nah, hell is the traps we lay for ourselves and blame on other people. So many layers of self-denial, self-effacement, and self-deception in this book. Vindictiveness. Refusing to forgive. Raging against the people you love/love you—or rather who youre supposed to love/love you — out of sheer self-deception. It feels like every single character in this book will fight tooth and nail for the veils they wear, refusing to see themselves or others as they really are. The scariest thing about this book is the horrifying masks everyone clings to. Kierkegaard would have a field day with these characters. Here you find varying degrees of people in hell: those in defiance and the demonic. Those in defiance: “those who defiantly will to be themselves. Who are offended by and in defiance of all existence, yet will to be themselves almost flouting their agony…They do not hope in the possibility of help, especially from God. And to seek help from someone else—no, not for all the world do they want that. Rather than to seek help, they prefer to be themselves with all the agonies of hell…raging against everything and everyone to prove that they are right, to have torment on hand and that no one can take it from them. (SUD, 71-2)” And the worst offenders in this hell Melchor writes about, the demonic: “In hatred toward existence, it wills to be itself; wills to be itself in accordance with its misery [this is Brando for sure I think]… Rebelling against all existence, it feels it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness…to adhere to its denunciation of its self and God out of malice and spite…to be themselves in their torment in order to stand against God as witness to him being a second-rate author.” (SUD, 73-4)

I think only the witch is in despair of a lesser degree. But on god this book should be retitled “The Sickness Unto Death: The Novel” because its subject is surely despair of intensifying degrees.

6.5/10

[wtrmelonbbz]

What my days are looking like

What is indulgence and overindulgence?¿

[elmundoestahechodefrasesyletras]

Con el alcohol las cosas buenas se hacían mejores y las culeras como que se soportaban más fácilmente.

[aroundtheworldin196books]

Mexico 🇲🇽 : Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and published by New Directions

The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice.

A book certainly not for the faint of heart, a work that would certainly be out of your comfort zone, and rightfully so. The frantic energy evokes the "hurricane" of the title. Read it, if you have the stomach for it.

Image: Orizaba, Veracruz State, Mexico. (Photo by Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)