Fernanda Melchor - Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo, 2023) ****½

Two years ago, I read "Paradais" by Mexican author Fernanda Melchor and I really liked it. So I was more than happy when the English translation of "Hurricane Season" was published. Again with thanks to publishing company Fitzcarraldo for investing in the translation of great non-English literature. 

Somewhere in a Mexican town, the dead body of the Witch is found in a ditch. The novel gives us the various perspectives of all the main characters in the context of this event, in a wonderful and lyrical kaleidoscope of views and experiences. 

The novel starts with a long 'monologue intérieur' by a kind of non-participating observer, whose long and ranting sentences betray a strong moral judgment and emotional connection to the murdered Witch. Because of its impersonal approach, this introduction may be somewhat off-putting, but then the story opens up gradually, by adding the direct experiences of the characters who orbit around the Witch: Yesenia, her cousion and good-for nothing Luismi, who left the Witch's home the morning her body was found together with his stepfather Munra; his friend Brando, tormented by secret lust; and Lusimi's lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather’s baby.

Life in the village is one of extreme poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, violence, sexual abuse, theft and total disrespect for other people. It is a life of survival and other people only exist for the characters' personal gratification and utility. The story was actually based on true events, and the intention was to write a non-fiction investigation of the murder, but Melchor soon realised that her presence to dig up the details of the murder could be highly dangerous, thus resorting a more fictitious approach of the event. 

Despite the squalour of life in the village, Melchor manages to create a lot of empathy even for the vilest of the people in her narrative. They are the victims of a situation for which they are not responsible: they are poor, uneducated, ignorant and they often make the wrong decisions, choosing immediate gratification over longer term solutions. Everyone is evil and nobody is. And her writing style is so direct and colloquial that it drives the action forward as if you were part of it all. You can also appreciate the work of the translator to keep language like this one close to its original: 

"Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated. You-drop your guard for a second and they'll crush you, Clarita, so you better just tell that fuckwit out there to buy you some clothes. Don't you be anyone's fool, that's what men are like: a bunch of lazy spongers who you have to keep rounding up to squeeze any use out of them, and that kid's no different; either you tell the little shit what's what or he'll spend all the money on drugs, and before you know it you're the cunt providing for him, Clarita. I'm telling you because I know the little prick, I know him and his tricks alright... I pushed him out! So don't you go losing your head on me, you hear? You've gotta tell him, you tell him to buy you clothes, give you spending money and take you out in Villa, you've gotta keep men like that on a tight leash, keep them busy to stop them coming out with all their shit. Norma nodded, but she had to raise a hand to her mouth to hide her smile when Chabela stopped talking for a second and the pair of them heard thundering snores coming from the man sleeping in the living room. Fucking Clarita, I see you pissing yourself laughing, you silly bitch, Chabela said, although she was also smiling, baring her big yellow teeth." (p.109)

There is beauty in this. That Melchor's magic. 

Han Kang - The Vegetarian (Granta, 2018) ***

When I take the book in my hands, I have trouble remembering what it was all about. I remember it is about a woman who decides to become vegetarian, but not for the usual moral or taste factors, but as the result of a dream. I remember the story was told by the different perspectives of the husband, the brother-in-law, her sister. I remember it is about sexuality, dreams and madness. Now I remember it's also about rebellion, societal rejection, generational conflict and violence. 

Even if I remember that I liked reading it, and even recommended it to my wife, I have a hard time describing the novel in more detail. Maybe it's my memory, maybe it's because the novel is less memorable than other novels. 

Still, the human pain is the feeling I get from the book, in all its complexity and sadness. 
 

Irene Vallejo - Papyrus (Hodder, 2023) ****½

I love books that give a broad, sweeping overview of everything there is to know about a subject, an encyclopaedic vision through history and the boundaries of our knowledge. This is such a book, and even more interesting, it's a book about books, about writing, about the importance of the physical aspects of human writing: clay tablets, parchment, paper, but even more so about what they achieved in terms of sharing stories, ideas and values. Irene Vallejo is a Spanish classical philologist with degrees from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Florence in Italy. 

Her passion is clear from the very start. She writes with incredible erudition, but with equal personal joy and personal experience of her relationship with texts and writing. 

 "After all the agonies of doubt, after exhausting every possible delay and excuse, one hot July afternoon, I face the void of the blank page. I've decided to open with the image of some enigmatic hunters stalking their prey. I identify with them. I appreciate their patience, their stoicism, the time they have taken, their steadiness, the adrena­line of the search. For years I have worked as an academic, consulting sources, keeping records, trying to get to know the historical mate­rial. But when it comes down to it, I'm so amazed by the true and recorded history I discover that it seeps into my dreams and acquires, without my volition, the shape of a story. I'm tempted to step into the skin of those who traveled the roads of an ancient, violent, tumultu­ous Europe in pursuit of books. What if I start by telling the story of their journey? It might work, but how can I keep the skeleton of facts distinct beneath the muscle and blood of imagination?  

The initial idea seems to me as fantastical as the journey in search of King Solomon's mines or the Lost Ark, but historical documents show that in the megalomaniacal minds of the kings of Egypt, it was truly possible. It might have been the last and only time - there, in the third century BC - that the dream of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. Today it seems like the plot of a fascinating, abstract story by Borges - or perhaps his great erotic fantasy." (p. XV)

She starts in ancient times, with the endeavour of Alexander The Great to conquer the known world, to create his own city of Alexandria in Egypt, with the largest collection of written material from all the places in his realm. He opened up the world to create a kind of proto-globalism where all cultures could meet and mingle, if not in person, then at least in their written forms. She draws a fantastic picture of how scrolls were written, how they were traded and collected, how they were catalogued and copied. It's a fascinating journey, one that we are of course by and large aware of, but she adds so many snippets of concrete examples and information that it make for fascinating reading. As in this example of the last Egyptian scribes, "who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization". In 380 CE, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman Empire. 

"(In the) Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile, (...) a group of priests took refuge, men who were repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom, engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words "for all time and eternity." Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels as prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And, along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken fourteen centu­ries to rediscover the key to that language. (p.53)

Or in this example on the origin of poetry, which makes sense and appears quite obvious once you think about it: 

"In their effort to endure, denizens of the oral world realized that rhythmic language was easiest to remember, and on the wings of this discovery, poetry was born. During recitation, the melody helps the speaker repeat each line without alteration, since it is when the music is broken that the sequence falters. All of us were made to learn poems in school. Years later, after forgetting so many other things, we find we can still remember these poems with extraordi­nary clarity" (p. 81)

I also liked this example to please and annoy my friends in medical practice: 

"What kind of education did those Greeks receive? They were steeped in culture in all its variety. Unlike us, they weren't remotely interested in specialization. They looked down their noses at knowl­edge of a technical nature. They weren't obsessed with employ­ment; after all, they had slaves to work for them. Those who could avoided anything as degrading as having a trade. Leisure was more refined - in other words, it involved cultivating the mind, fostering friendships, making conversation, and leading a contemplative life. Only medicine, an unquestionable social necessity, demanded its own particular kind of training. As a result, doctors suffered from an overt cultural inferiority complex. All of them, from Hippocrates to Galen, repeated the mantra in their texts that a doctor is also a philosopher. They wished to avoid being confined to their field and tried to show themselves to be cultured, slipping the occasional quote by a key poet into their writings." (p. 179) 

She also gives a reflection on her own academic research, and the book format gives her also the opportunity to write about herself, about her own experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply personal. 

As a PhD student she went to the Oxford Library to do some research, but she is confronted with the obligation to "take the oath": 

"A bald man behind a desk interrogated me with­out making eye contact. I answered all his questions, justified my presence, and showed him the papers he asked for with somewhat intimidating politeness. There was a long silence while he entered my information into his vast database, and then, hands still on his keyboard, in a startling swerve in time, he suddenly stepped into the Middle Ages and informed me pompously that the time had come for me to take the oath. He handed me a small stack of laminated cards that showed, each in a different language, the words I would have to say. I did so. I swore to obey the rules. Not to steal, damage, or deface a single book. Not to set fire to the library or help cause a blaze and watch with diabolical pleasure as the roaring flames engulfed its treasures, reducing them to ash." (p. 44)

 Or this even more personal reflection, which again lifts the book out of the academic space into a more personal environment, the perspective that is obviously excluded from any scientific research and publications: 

"Violence among children and teenagers is protected by a barrier of murky silence. For years I took comfort in not having been the class snitch, the tattletale, the coward. Not to have stooped that low. Misplaced pride and shame made me fol­low the rule that certain stories aren't told. Wanting to be a writer was a belated rebellion against that law. The stories that go untold are exactly the ones you must tell. I decided to become the snitch I was so afraid to be. The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nur­tures everything I write. (p.226)

But of course the main message is the power of literature, of writing, of books in all their forms, how they made ideas accessible to anyone around the world, to start sharing common values and a common culture, or at least to value that they're might be other perspectives to look at the same reality: 

"In a time when the vast majority of Greeks scarcely set foot outside their native village, Herodotus was a tireless traveler. He enlisted on merchant ships, moved in slow caravans, struck up con­versation with many people, and visited a great number of cities in the Persian Empire, to give an account of the war with knowledge of the terrain and a range of perspectives. When he met the enemy in his daily life, he offered a different and more precise vision than any other writer. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere, Herodotus strove to topple his Greek countrymen's prejudices, teaching them that "the line between civilization and barbarism is never a geographic bor­der between countries, but a moral border within every people, and beyond that, within each individual." It's curious to note, so many centuries after Herodotus wrote his work, that the earliest history book begins in a ferociously modern way. There are wars between East and West, kidnappings, mutual accusations, differing versions of the same events, and alternative facts".  (p.162)

It is an ode to knowledge, to intellectual curiosity and debate ...

"In its ambiguous state as a Greek city outside of Greece and the seed of Europe beyond the bounds of Europe, Alexandria came to see itself from the outside. During the Library's greatest era and following in Alexander's wake, the Stoic philosophers were bold enough to teach for the first time that all people belonged to a com­munity without borders and were obliged to accept humanity wher­ever and under whichever circumstances they encountered it. We should remember the Greek capital of the Nile delta as the place where this effervescence was born, where the languages and tradi­tions of others began to matter, and where the world and knowledge were understood to be a shared territory. In these aspirations we find a precursor to the great European dream of universal citizenship. Writing, books, and libraries were the technologies that made this utopia possible". (p.232)

... and of course the incredible value of the freedom of speech: 

"Days before The Satanic Verses appeared in bookstores, during the publicity campaign, an Indian journalist asked Rushdie, off the record, whether he was aware of the row that was coming. The writ­er's response was unequivocal: 'It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots." 

If we look back at the general history of book destruction, we'll see that in fact, the funny view of the world - the oasis, the strange paradise, the Shangri-La, the forest of Lothlorien - is freedom of expression. Over the centuries, the written word has been stubbornly persecuted, and the times when bookstores receive only peaceful visitors who do not wave flags or wag fingers, break windows or set things on fire, or give themselves over to the primitive zeal for prohibition, are in fact the unusual ones. " (p. 294)

The scientific study of writing and books becomes a personal story as well as a humanistic manifesto. At times it is not easy to follow the logic or the thread of her narrative, because so many pieces of information are provided. It is this wealth that makes the book so entertaining and a pleasure to read. 

Highly recommended!

Tim Winton - Juice (Picador, 2024) ****

Set in a dystopian future, somewhere in Australia, a man and a girl are being held captive by an armed man, and locked up underground in a former mine. The man has to explain, to justify who he is in order to persuade his captor to let them live. The book tells the story of the man, like a modern-day Sheherazade, trying to persuade their captor, story after story to extend the time they have to live, or to be convincing enough to be released. As a consequence, this is a thick book. 

The environment plays a key role as backdrop: the world is scorched, people have to live underground for half the year to avoid the blisters they get from the sun, while cultivating their land and collecting water for the other half of the year to be able to survive. The environment is harsh, and so are the people. They distrust one another, they trade out of necessity, and strangers are always suspect and risk to rob you of all your belongings. 

The narrator gets recruited by The Service, a vague and secret organisation that keeps order and attacks the few oligarchs and corporate dynasties who live in all unimaginable wealth in self-constructed hidden places and palaces. The attacks are a kind of retribution, an act of vengeance for the world they destroyed.

The world is brutal, harsh, violent. Even his relationship with his mother is one of distance and secrecy, despite the fact that they live together. His relationship with his partner is also transactional more than a relationship of love. 

Even if the destruction of our environment is the theme of the book, its reflection on human interaction, on social and psychological consequences are as important. 

You may say that the subject is not very original, that many other books and movies cover the same subject, and that is of course true, but Winton's approach is sufficiently disconcerting, unique and compelling to stand out in this long list of dystopian literature. Winton writes with power, in a style that reflects the experience and the personality of the narrator. Like his almost voiceless captor, you wonder whether or not he is telling the truth, whether all the details he provides are invented or real, whether all his efforts to work for The Service have actually happened or not. 

And maybe that is the most interesting part of the novel. You have to listen and assess what's being said. Like the captor, you know the narrator has an agenda, one that must make him the good guy, so that he can hope to live in the end. 

Up to you to decide whether you keep him alive or not. 

Haruki Murakami - The City And Its Uncertain Walls (Harvill Secker, 2024) ***½

A new novel by Murakami is always something to look forward too, and I must say the last few ones were a slight deception. His style and tone remain the same: simple, everyday questions that normal people have towards life get tangled up in a space between reality and the supernatural, a kind of magical realism. 

In this novel it is a kind of shadow-world - actually a place where all people have shed their shadow - that is enclosed and timeless. It reminds me of Jim Crace's "Eden", a paradise that is equally enclosed by a high wall and where it is hard to get in or out. Only, the paradise does not really seem to be what it is. 

Murakami still is the master of the subtle changes, the slight transformation of perspectives that try to give us a glimpse of another reality, one that is less corporeal yet equally real, but hard to pin down. The question is whether the change is a real one or a psychological one. 

 "The scene also reminded me of a page from a picture book I'd read as a child. In it was a premonition-that something was about to change. Turn a corner and find something awaiting me there. A feeling I often had as a boy. And that something there would tell me a critical fact, which would force a suitable transformation in me." (p.196)

"I had the vague sense that something around me was gradu­ally changing. It was as if, unaware, I was slowly being led some­where by some sort of power. But was this a recent development, or something that had been going on from quite some time ago? I had no clue. (p. 287)

It is also symbolic that the main character becomes a librarian, with his alter ego working as a dream reader in the library of dreams in the enclosed space in the other world. There is no real evil in the novel, just different realities with unclear and abstract passages between them, leading to mystery and existential surprise, a detective story of the possible. 

Yet the mystery remains. The story develops and things become increasingly clear - as one would expect, and despite the many strange things happening, it becomes plausible under Murakami's pen, and never deteriorates into blunt fantasy story-telling. Not suprisingly, the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez come to mind, and literally mentioned here.  

""In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one," she said. "Like that's an entirely ordinary, everyday thing." 

"People often call that magical realism," I said. 

"True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for Garcia Marquez him­self it's just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them." 

I sat down on the stool beside her and said, "So you' re saying that in the world he inhabits, the real and the unreal are equiva­lent and that Garcia Marquez is simply recording that." 

'Yes, I think that might be the case. And that's what I like about his novels." (p. 392)

In the epilogue the author explains how the story for this book had been germinating for decades, until finally the time was ripe to actually write it. Even if it is a nice book, it does not really add anything new to Murakami's output, apart from being an entertaining read. And the older he gets, the more words he seem to need to come to the essence of his story. At times I think that he writes too naturally and too fluently which creates a lot of sentences that go to the detriment of the tension and forward drive that you expect from a mystery novel. Or maybe I am getting to old, which is also a possible perspective of course.