Hurricane Season

Reading Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor, is to be plunged into a fast-moving, compulsive, bluntly lyrical (yes, read it and see what I mean!) narrative that keeps ripping away layers of itself by switching perspectives throughout the book.  It shows a cruel, hopeless, hard world, with characters so damaged by their circumstances that everything is tangled with superstition, poverty, violence, power, sex, and drugs.  The prose is written as long, unbroken-up chapters, a technique that could have obscured the content: instead, it pulls you further and further into the story, as if you are helplessly locked into a roller-coaster cart racing down a steep, steep slope.  The writing is precise, evocative, brutal, and shows the talent of both Melchor and her translator, Sophie Hughes. 

I'd been recommended this book by one of my MA Publishing students, Ana De La Borbolla Escalante: her energetic praise for it convinced me to give it a try, and I am so glad I did.  It's not a book I'd otherwise have picked up, but one that will stay with me for a long, long time.  Its bleakness, and yet its packed-with-colour, life-and-death precarity, written so skilfully, makes this a modern classic.  I can understand why it has been shortlisted for this year's International Booker Prize, and been reviewed so positively by The Guardian, NPR (I think the reviewer here has it spot on when he calls Melchor's prose "a linguistic blitzgrieg"), The TLS (which calls the effect the book has "a kind of sensory bludgeoning"), and The New York Times, where the reviewer praises both writer and translator, saying, "Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices."

Fernanda Melchor is a 38 year old Mexican writer; Sophie Hughes a British translator (who coincidentally did an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL, I discovered!). In an interview they did for Granta, Melchor talks about writing, and her aims:

"Without a reader, a book is nothing, just paper and printed smudges. For me, the real book only exists inside the reader’s mind, and I take that very seriously. One of the things I really like of Stephen King’s books is that he’s always addressing his readers, saying things like: ‘Take my hand, Constant Reader, and let me guide you into this darkness’, and that’s precisely what I love about novels and books and literature in general: that they’re journeys, dreamscapes made possible only by the imagination of those who wrote them and those who read them. And it’s easy to forget the power of words in an era ruled by profuse, beautiful and entrancing images, a time where it seems impossible to focus on reading for more that ten, twenty minutes without feeling the urge to tweet about it. Never before have we been so distracted, and never before have those distractions been so enjoyable. Why bother to read a novel when you can buy a videogame console and be the hero of your own adventure? That’s why I wanted to make an experience of Hurricane Season. It seemed to me the only way possible to communicate that particular story, even if that meant grabbing the reader by the throat and roughing her up a little. But then that’s exactly the kind of books I like, the ones that are like natural disasters, the ones Kafka said were like axes for the frozen sea within us."


Hughes, in another interview, said that the process of translating this book was "emotionally draining and creatively exhilarating".  Her own description of Melchor's achievement explains the challenges she had with  the translation: "There’s a kind of warped beauty to both Fernanda’s language and her eye for detail. I relished having a ringside view of the latter and really enjoyed trying to match the musicality of the gross vernacular and the clash of registers in the original by making strange brews of English words that might have the same effect that the Spanish had on me, which was to jolt me out of complacency."

Thank you, Ana, for bringing this book, and these two incredibly talented women writers, to my attention: I'll be watching what both do next, and rooting for Hurricane Season to win the Booker!

(And, as a PS, kudos to Fitzcarraldo Editions for a beautiful reading experience:  these deep blue books with French flaps, custom serif typeface and quality paper pages definitely set up the text to its best advantage.)

Heloise and Abelard, or Love in the Time of Covid19

We are in the middle of a strange and unsettling time, with Covid19 forcing us to work from home, and stay away from workplaces, friends, and family.  Having some annual leave now seems odd, but it's been booked for a while, and because of how crazy busy the crisis has made work, it's actually perfect timing to step away from the inbox and video calls, and do some catch-up reading.  This weekend, therefore, I tackled two historical novels that both tell the story of the twelfth-century scholars and lovers, Heloise and Abelard:  Peter Abelard, by Helen Waddell, and Love Without End, by Melvyn Bragg.

I'd bought the Bragg a few weeks ago in Toppings in Ely, -- historical fiction, medieval, beautiful cover, irresistible! -- but the Waddell was a coincidental find, via a friend and Victorian specialist, Lizzie Ludlow, who had recommended it to me, describing it in such glowing terms that I sourced a lovely old Pan edition from Ebay, and read it this Sunday, after finishing Love Without End on Saturday.  Reading them together made for a rewarding experience, and because they approach the lovers in such different ways, this opened up the history, making the perspectives shed light on what's known about their lives so that a deeper appreciation of what they endured -- and what they achieved -- could be appreciated.

It has also, as I think Lizzie expected it would, made me fascinated with Helen Waddell.  From previous posts you'll know I've been looking at women writers, especially women historical writers, from the first part of the twentieth century, and Helen Waddell is certainly someone who should be better known.  She does have champions:  Kate Mosse did a documentary about her for the BBC in 2018 , saying that "Helen Waddell was a pioneer in the now flourishing world of historical fiction, yet today she is barely remembered," and an article in The Irish Times in 2014 describes how she was "an Irish literary superstar" of her time, adding that as an academic, her lectures at Oxford "drew audiences that today would almost compare with rock-star status."  She came late to academia, having had to care for her ill step-mother; when she died in 1920, Helen was able to go to Oxford, to Somerville College.  Her first academic book, The Wandering Scholars, was published in 1927, by Constable.

This was a book looking at medieval Latin lyric poetry, with many translations done by Waddell herself:  it was an academic bestseller, and she was the first woman to be awarded the A. C. Benson Foundation Silver Medal from the Royal Society of Literature for her achievement.  Peter Abelard, also published by Constable, came out in 1933, and was a great commercial and critical success (I will check this out with more research once I can get access to archives again).  As Constance J. Mews points out, Waddell and Heloise had a great deal in common: "they were both educated women, gifted with an acute literary sensibility [and] neither could easily find their way in a world in which academic opportunities were largely controlled by men." ('Helen Waddell and Heloise: The Continuity of a Learned Tradition', in Jennifer Fitzgerald, ed., Helen Waddell Reassessed:  New Readings, Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 21-39). 

And yet, in Waddell's novel, it is Peter Abelard who gets star billing, and from whose perspective most of the novel is given, not Heloise.  Melvyn Bragg weaves the twelfth century with a twenty-first century one, using the vehicle of an author writing about the lovers, in Paris, and talking about his book with his daughter, to bring out some of the challenges of the story to contemporary readers.  The writer's daughter, Julia, is incensed first by Abelard's actions, and then Heloise's acceptance of her future at Abelard's direction.  Bragg uses the voice of Arthur, the writer, to explain how the historical and theological contexts the lovers lived in means that it is impossible to judge them on today's standards.  Although this technique is not always effective -- there are several points when the exposition feels awkward and patronising -- Bragg does succeed in telling a story, as he has Arthur insists he is writing, "about Heloise and Abelard.  . . not a pound of Heloise and a ton of Abelard" (p.215).  Waddell's novel is more detailed, historically, but leaves the lives of Heloise and Abelard well before they end (there is a hint that Waddell intended to write more books about the pair, and never managed it, which would make sense of where Peter Abelard finishes): it also leaves Heloise the more shadowy, contained character.  Without giving out too many spoilers for either fictional retelling, what both succeed in doing is underline the remarkable talents of the couple, in a time when the Church held power over people, and when an intellectual woman, or a woman with any education at all, was a rare thing. 


Both novels have sparked a deeper interest in learning about Waddell, and about Heloise and Peter Abelard; in inspiring not only that, but the desire to pick up my blog again and record these reading experiences, both books have helped me to switch off from the news, and from work, and for that respite I am very grateful.  Thanks to Lizzie for the nudge to discover Waddell, and, during this time of isolation, to Toppings in Ely, who are helping to further this new-found curiosity by posting out the Penguin Letters of Abelard to Eloise to me, so I can keep reading!