MixedThe NationThe novel’s flat, near-affectless prose—sparse and unadorned in the original Spanish and rendered fluidly into English by Wimmer—reflects [the narrator\'s] inability, or her unwillingness, to involve herself. This distance allows the narrator to bring the past to vivid life, but it has the unfortunate effect of turning the reader into a helpless spectator staring into a screen ... Fernández is in full command of her narrative ability, maintaining and ratcheting up the tension despite having already revealed how this story is going to end—terribly. Yet the revelation of the narrator’s glancing involvement in this story, of just how close she’d come, feels unsatisfying ... The narrator continually compares Valenzuela to a ghost, but the figure whose absence most marks the book is the narrator herself ... t’s hard not to read the book’s formal ambiguity—caught between autofiction and narrative nonfiction—as a kind of shield, one that allows Fernández to avoid the responsibilities and commitments of nonfiction, on the one hand, and fiction’s imperative of imaginative creation on the other ... The mystery at the center of this book is finally the narrator, who offers neither meat nor blood to this story.
Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes
RaveThe NationAt first, the book’s structure seems to match that of a police procedural, with each chapter circling closer to establishing motive, method, meaning. But much like the activists, Melchor burrows so deeply into the circumstances of the murder as to shatter them and raise much more discomfiting questions about the everyday—and intimate—nature of violence against women. The novel’s language, deftly rendered into English by Sophie Hughes, matches the claustrophobic enclosure of a small town in rural Mexico, yet it crackles with expansive gestures to the outside world. Rather than a simple testimonial or act of witness to this violence, however, Melchor’s virtuosic deployment of slang and bitter insults—of weaponized speech—transforms the violence of her novel and, by extension, the violence of femicide into what Cathy Park Hong calls \'an artwork of vengeance.\' Hurricane Season is a novel that refuses the call to come together, to overcome, to heal. It insists on being heard ... The style recalls Thomas Bernhard in its dexterity and vicious humor, but where Bernhard offers vivisections of single characters, Melchor continually breaks outside the confines of individual consciousness, pushing her characters to inhabit, if only briefly, the thoughts and lives of others. The result is stunning, a tapestry of interwoven lives in which even the most righteous character is shown to be capable of enormous cruelty—and of suffering dearly for it. Melchor’s language hems the reader in with an unspooling, unforgiving wall of text that relies minimally on periods and not at all on paragraph breaks. Her prose unfolds in great looping circles ... stomach-churning, molar-grinding, nightmare-inducing, and extraordinarily clear-eyed account of the ordinary horrors men inflict upon women.
Hernan Diaz
RavePaste MagazineThe story Håkan tells is a Western, of sorts. Or is it a mystical parable about a troubled world? Or perhaps an apocalyptic road novel, drenched in blood and fire and thirst? An elaborate homage to the Odyssey (or to Borges’ love of cowboys)? A historical novel about 18th-century migration to the U.S.? ... It is all of those things, though its deceptively simple narrative structure—a man tells a captive audience a gripping tale—manages to resist easy categorization. The prose is smooth and light, its protagonist and central character freed of weighty reflection, zig-zagging anxiety or any linguistic fireworks. Yet this lightness makes In the Distance a difficult thing to grasp; it is a book that rewards re-reading ... Díaz’s great gift lies in reconfiguring the possible, the expected, the taken-for-granted into something extraordinary.
C. Morgan Babst
MixedPaste\"There are moments of great beauty and power in the book. Babst succeeds in tracing New Orlean’s social and racial divisions to their root, providing withering commentary on a murderously oblivious white upper-class that still uses words like \'octoroon\' in polite society. She is also a particularly dexterous writer, weaving from past to present in the course of a single paragraph or sentence without losing steam or distracting the reader. The density of the book’s prose works to mirror in her characters’ tangled thoughts the devastate ... Yet there is an unfortunate side effect of treating the storm as an enormous metaphor. In granting the storm such symbolic weight, Babst tends to ignore the enormous material cost the storm—aided and accelerated by human interference and negligence—wrought on the lives of New Orleanians, particularly its black residents. The book contains only glancing references to the horrors that descended upon the city after the levees broke ... It’s almost as though Babst, realizing the storm was too large to adequately represent in a single novel, decided to turn the storm into the overwrought backdrop upon which she could set a series of smaller, more manageable tragedies.\
