After a fashion we learn to suspend disbelief and surrender to the novel’s dark energy and linguistic thrills. The characters emerge as unreliable narrators and sifting their stories for truth proves increasingly futile. Each chapter is devoted to one character, and their tale or tirade unfolds in a single paragraph composed of long, breathless sentences that build in momentum and reach feverish levels of intensity. Those testimonies come as thick, ferocious, spleen-venting torrents. For instead of throwing light on the matter, their testimonies muddy the already murky water. It gets worse when Melchor brings in certain villagers to give their version of events leading up to the Witch’s murder. At night, the townsmen would gate-crash her hovel with its bricked-up windows and boarded-up doors and use and abuse her during wild parties.įrom this point on the rumor mill kicks in, grinding up all manner of half-baked hearsay and unsubstantiated theories: The Witch fornicated with the devil, she kept a stash of treasure in her home. Fernanda Melchor’s English-language debut begins with a cold, hard, unalterable fact: a corpse floating in an irrigation canal, the rotten face a “dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes.” The deceased was known by residents of the village of La Matosa as “the Witch.” She helped local women in need by concocting various lotions and potions.
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