Buy it here:

Seven Stories Press, Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In this devastating novel, Clyo Mendoza, a Mexican poet and novelist in her twenties, 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

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 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.

Review:

Most of the time, when I think of weird fiction, I think of stories that have more of a speculative plot. Stories that take place in alternate universes or timelines, or just odd life occurrences happening to normal people. In Fury by Clyo Mendoza, she writes another type of weird fiction, one where the people are weird and trying to navigate a seemingly normal universe. The book is split into five sections, and each on of them focuses on one of three half-brothers, Lazaro, Juan, or Salvador. The common thread between these three is their father, Vincente, a predator, womanizer, and man who eventually goes crazy and dies as a dog. Each of of his sons play an important role in the lives of the other brothers, and all of them try to scourge him from their personalities. The two motivations of every man in this novel is either sex or revenge, both being equally important and equally destructive to everyone. 

There are so many interesting things that happen during the journey through Fury. All of the stories of the men, looking for their love or their revenge, end up with them broken. There is no real outcomes to the anger or jealousy that motivates them, nothing good comes from this. This makes Fury not only a epic journey for all of those involved, but a cautionary tale. The emotions that motivate us will sometimes destroy us if we are not careful. None of the men learn this lesson. There is no redemption. This is what makes this novel somewhat hard to read. Most of the stories readers enjoy are stories where a lesson is learned and the misguided character finds redemption at the end. There is none of this in Fury. Instead we get a group of misguided characters, lost in the desert, motivated by anger or lust, and not a single person finds any sort of solace in the outcome of their actions. 

This does not stop their journeys from being compelling. The story is bleak and the characters are broken people breaking others, but the writing is beautiful. It is not surprising that Clyo Mendoza is an award winning poet. What is surprising is that she is barely thirty writing novels with this much depth and darkness. She seems to have a connection to the ugliness in the spirit of man that many writers want but do not have. So many of her paragraphs and scenes that are artful and mind blowing, and the story as a whole, of weird people interacting with a normal world, is written in such a compelling way that we sometimes forget that the people involved are pretty terrible people. Clyo Mendoza is easily one of the best young writers I have read in a long time.

I received an ARC of Fury through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.