Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

FURIA

Clyo Mendoza

FURY is the tremendous debut novel by Clyo Mendoza, one of Mexico's most daring and exciting new voices - a phantasmagoric journey of eroticism, consciousness, and violence set in a hallucinatory Mexican desert landscape conjuring the worlds of Cormac McCarthy and Juan Rulfo.

Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers. In a desert landscape spattered by war-torn villages, two deserters discover a dark secret about their family. A curse hangs over the lineage of Vicente Barrera, a wandering yarn salesman who traversed the desert from village to village. In Salvador, Maria has discovered a love that is so profound it seems to dissolve them into one another, melding their dreams together, as if dreamt by the same mind. The desert becomes the site where these characters' fates intermingle and their wounds are inherited and bleed. FURY, as seductive as it is unsettling, tells the story of those children, their bodies and their affections. It is also the story of the women who surround them: mothers, lovers, friends. In the midst of this plot of misfortunes, we find the search for an absent father, an urgent exploration of masculinity, and the onset of crisis around the bestial origin of desire. Winner of the Premio Internacional de Poesía Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, Clyo Mendoza has written a debut novel of extraordinary beauty, where language unfurls a hallucinatory journey through eroticism, transitions of consciousness, and the possibility that multiple beings may inhabit a single body. FURY is a moving interrogation of love, violence, and the suffering that accompanies both. Clyo Mendoza is a poet and novelist. Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1993, she has published work in some of the most important Spanish-language anthologies, including POETAS PARRICIDAS and TIEMBLA. She has been a FONCA scholar for Poetry and the Novel and a scholar at the Fundación Antonio Gala in Cordoba, Spain and is the author of ANAMNESIS (Cuadrivio, 2016) and SILENCIO (Fondo Editorial del Estado de México, 2018), for which she was awarded the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize in 2017. She is currently working on a new novel and collaborating on a transmedia project.

Available products
Book Published by Seven Stories Press

Comments

Some books function as charms. They hold captivating stories, sure, but also words that are written as small poems or spells, ancestral wisdom, wild sensuality, desert dust, spilled blood, and a pinch of optimism in the midst of darkness. These are texts that are recommended during times of post-pandemic uncertainty. This is the case with Furia, the first novel by Mexican author Clyo Mendoza.

A hallucinatory, hypnotic, and beautiful novel, like looking out open the desert.

Through a twisted family tree where Juan and Lázaro, eternal soldiers in the phantasmagorical limbo of the Mexican revolution, and a handful of women with mutant bodies and loves that are as powerful as vengeance, Clyo Mendoza takes us through dozens of stories of sex, hate, abandonment, and magic, narrated and distorted with the strength of the oral tradition that she draws on to tell the story of the hallucinatory and brutal language of the desert - conjuring the necessary language so that even ghosts become real.

In Furia, her first novel, Clyo Mendoza demonstrates a powerful literary breath set in a desert with identity that is rooted in magic and trickery.

Orality and fragmentation, the legendary and the everyday, violence and redemption - each one of these components contributes to this story of sons who have been touched by disgrace and cursed parents, and they set the bar very high for upcoming novels.

With echoes of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Mendoza crafts a repetitive language and narrates characters and scenes that get lost and show back up in a substrate that could be called anthropological. You cannot escape Furia unscathed, because the author has marked her writing with a search for the essential that takes her through very ancient time and that - strangely and paradoxically - takes the leader to a very modern maze where the space of the desert and the eternity of what we desire become one.

Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men - and their mothers, lovers, and companions - Mendoza strips down the animal drive that boils and crashes against pain, fear, and desire in a landscape that both imprisons and liberates them.