Interview Fernanda Melchor | Hurricane Season (Orkaanseizoen) | Crossing Border festival Nov 2020

Interviewer: Persis Bekkering
In Mexico, everything seems polarized. The country has been torn apart by the drug cartels, and it seems fascinated with both religion and death. De Mexicans tend to live their lives in either gigantic cities or in rural communities, that sometimes seem comparable with the world before the invention of electricity. The Mexican spirit and culture has dealt us a lot of amazing novels, art and cinema in the past decades. Fernanda Melchor, a former journalist, is the newest addition to the ever-growing group of interesting Mexican authors and artists. In her fiction she seems to use all of her former methods as a journalist to write about her country in ways that exceed the daily means.
Her second novel, Hurricane Season, has been her absolute worldwide breakthrough. It is a book with a very creative form of storytelling: some paragraphs run for no less than several pages, others have the shape of small poems. The story describes a small Mexican community that gets torn apart by murder - both literally and metaphorically.
Fernanda Melchor (1982) is a Mexican author. Her second novel, Hurricane Season, has been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize.

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Impressive use of language in that novel! When reading Hurricane Season, don’t focus on the sordid, violent events, focus on language, on rhythm, on what this woman is able to do with words, which are both obscene and beautiful throughout the novel. She is really close to be a genious.