Fury A novel

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.)

Sex, revenge, death, and hidden histories populate a rough landscape in this experimental debut. The first novel by acclaimed young Mexican poet Mendoza opens with two soldiers, Lázaro and Juan, who've decided to desert. (No place and time are given, but the era of the Mexican Revolution is a reasonable surmise.) As they wander, they share stories or muse on their pasts, while encountering people with their own pasts to share; they discuss homosexuality, selling their souls to the Devil, and prostitution. Before he dies, Lázaro recalls his urge to locate his father, who abandoned him as a child and violently abused his mother; discovering he had the same father, Juan heads to the desert to track him down and kill him for "sowing the seed of his cursed bloodline everywhere he passed." This spine of a plot, however lurid, matters less than the lyrical, phantasmagoric, symbolic tenor of the prose, through which Mendoza explores the fragile, fluid nature of the human body. Characters shift gender and even species, morphing from dog to human and back again; the dead speak; an extended sequence takes place in a morgue, with erotic overtones that couldn't underscore the book's themes of life and death more overtly. It's bemusing, at times baffling stuff, but the bleak, eerie mood is well sustained. MacSweeney, an expert at translating tricky Spanish-language writers like Valeria Luiselli and Elvira Navarro, cleanly captures Mendoza's urge to pile narrative upon narrative and maintains a poker-faced tone even when the storytelling is at its most transgressive. However confusing, the novel sustains the idea that cruelty is humanity's inheritance; "so much pain had been stored in his well that it was now almost full," Juan recalls, and he's not the only one. A moody, spiky yarn of inherited loss and violence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.