| Dystopian |
| Literary |
| Fiction |
Summary
Summary
In this debut novel, Clyo Mendoza, a young, award-winning Mexican poet and novelist, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.
" Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel." --Mónica Ojeda
"A beguiling and enticing fever dream of sex and violence in the Mexican desert. . . . This is impossible to put down." --Publishers Weekly , starred review
In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and hallucinating from heat and thirst, mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men--and of their mothers, lovers and companions--Mendoza explores her characters' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.
After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.
"An amazing, hypnotic and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert." --Juan Pablo Villalobos
Author Notes
Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, México, 1993) is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collections Anamnesis (2016) and Silencio (2018), which was awarded the Premio Internacional de Poesía Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the novel Furia (2021), which was awarded the Premio Javier Morote by the Confederación Española de Gremios y Asociaciones de Libreros and the Amazon Premio Primera Novela. She has contributed to numerous poetry anthologies, including Poetas parricidas (Cuadrivio, 2014), Los reyes Subterráneos: Veinte poetas jóvenes de México (La Bella Varsovia, 2015), and Liberoamericanas: 80 poetas contemporáneas (Liberoamérica, 2018). Mendoza is the recipient of scholarships from the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and the Fundación Antonio Gala, in Córdoba, Spain. She has also collaborated on various transdisciplinary projects and experiments with painting, photography, and sound collage.
Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, and Jazmina Barrera, whose autobiographical text, Linea Nigra , was a double finalist in the NBCC awards (translation and autobiography). She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles, and interviews on a variety of platforms.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing on the language of cinema and oral history, Mendoza debuts with a beguiling and enticing fever dream of sex and violence in the Mexican desert. The story begins in the aftermath of a battle, possibly during the Mexican Civil War, though the passage of time in Mendoza's hands is slippery and undefined. Juan and Lázaro, two young soldiers from opposing armies, meet while rounding up the dead and decide to desert together. On the road, they encounter a trader who tells them an elliptical story about a man who makes a deal with the devil to learn the truth about his lineage and ends up turning into a dog. The ex-soldiers then hole up in a cave and become lovers before Lázaro falls mortally ill. Juan aches with desire for Lázaro and has nightmarish visions of his demise ("The idea of death grew within him like something akin to the long desert horizon. A great, black, cubic space, something his eyes were incapable of measuring"). It turns out Juan and Lázaro are half-brothers, and the novel's later sections, full of strange recursive scenes that reference the trader's story, gradually reveal a legacy of adultery, rape, and murder. The narrative also follows another man, Salvatore, who wanders into the desert like the hero of a film he's obsessed with before he transforms into a dog, has sex with cacti, and commits other freakish acts. Mendoza's depictions of her troubled characters' inner lives are as indelible as her monstrous visions. This is impossible to put down. (Feb.)