Incest, violence, occult curses – enter Clyo Mendoza’s surreal desert

Fury, the debut novel by a young Mexican poet, is a deeply strange and richly written tale of fraternal love in a war-torn landscape

The Huichol people are famous throughout Mexico for their yarn paintings. Made by sticking different coloured threads to a wooden tablet with resin or wax, the tapestries are designed to reflect the relationships between humans, animals and nature-gods. Often, tablets include figures of all three, set together in surreal, highly symbolic landscapes.
Clyo Mendoza’s debut novel, Fury, at times reads like their literary equivalent. There isn’t much in the way of plot. Instead, what we get is a collage of character portraits, set in and around the towns of a war-torn Mexican desert and intricately bound together by the womanising figure of Vicente Barrera – an itinerant seller of (literal) yarns. 
Strange, dreamlike things happen in this desert. A mysterious elderly trader foretells the future and hands out gold coins; a young woman encounters a blind toothless lady on horseback and develops a phantom pregnancy; a morgue worker gets lost among the cacti and slowly metamorphoses into a dog. All the while, the war rumbles in the background. We never hear anything concrete about the conflict: it’s an amorphous threat, looming over the characters’ thoughts and actions.
As in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, that 1967 masterpiece of magical realism, time here moves in loops and curves. Events recur across generations; different characters fall victim to the same kinds of insanity, murder and sexual violence. One woman bathes with her friend, washing her breasts with soapwort in a manner that makes it look “like they are suckling each other”. Later, the first woman hears the story repeated back to her by a stranger as if it were a folk tale. A man has an idea for a screenplay about someone “who lives in the desert until, one day, something alters his peace of mind”; soon he goes mad and moves into the desert himself. And like One Hundred Years of Solitude, this is a story of a “cursed bloodline”. The patriarch, Vicente, fathers three sons – Lázaro, Juan and Salvador – with three different women. All the men, in their own ways, come to tragic ends.
We open as two of them, Juan and Lázaro, meet on the battlefield. Without knowing anything about each other – “Who were they? It was months since either of them had remembered that information” – the pair become incestuous lovers, decide to abandon the fight, and hide out in the desert together. We end in the desert, too, with another duo of brothers – Juan and Salvador this time – running away from their enemies. This time, though, one of the two is chained up like an animal, beset by insanity. 
The doubling captures the entropic mood of Mendoza’s narrative: circular as it seems, things are unravelling, coming undone. The further you read, the more evident it becomes how cleverly this dual structure is set up. Plot lines that seem tangential on first glance turn out to be crucial later on; early events can only be fully understood in the light of information you receive at the very end.
Mendoza has previously published two collections of poetry (the second of which, Silencio [2018], was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Prize). And her prose, admirably rendered into English by Christina MacSweeney, is leavened by a wonderful imagistic sensibility. As it discusses Juan and Lázaro’s clandestine sexual exploits, for instance, it briefly moves its gaze away to pause on a bird visiting the cave in which they’re hiding. Unstartled by the brothers’ cries, it feasts on the “white pulp” of an over-ripe fruit it finds by the cave’s entrance: “The bird’s slender tongue would protrude from its beak like a pistil. Tiny droplets of juice dampened its breast and, having had its fill, it would fly high enough to view the splendour of the sun on the empty road.”
It’s an image that captures the tenderness of Juan and Lázaro’s relationship. And it speaks to the fragility present throughout Mendoza’s impressive novel. Life, in Fury’s desert, is allowed to blossom – but only in small, sheltered pockets, and always, seemingly, on the brink of disaster.
Fury, tr Christina MacSweeney, is published by Seven Stories at £14.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books