Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Hurricane Season Reviews

• 
  CJ Ailey

  The funny thing is, I can't quite say I enjoyed or even exactly LIKED this book. And yet, I thought it was evidence of tremendous talent and am glad I read it. It's quite grueling, harsh in imagery and events, and really quite unremittingly dark. And yet that all felt intentional and, surprisingly, not at all gratuitous. The author's prose is fantastic and the translator deserves 5 stars all by herself must have been wildly difficult to translate and she did an absolutely exceptional job.
• 
  Duane Schneider

  The comparisons of "Hurricane Season" to Faulkner are inevitable and apt. Here, Melchor has created a fictional village (somewhere along the central Mexican coast?), long swirling sentences, a series of unreliable narrators, and a jumbled chronology. But whereas Faulkner's language was erudite and sometimes obscure, Melchor's is simple and often profane. It is the plainspoken language of the characters, who are marginally employed (sometimes as prostitutes), crippled, sometimes vicious, struggling to survive. There is no money. The characters are sweaty and unclean. Men prey on women and on each other violently and sexually. Drugs are plentiful. Men are physically assaulted in jail by the jailers and the fellow inmates. The novel begins with the death of The Witch, a transvestite abortionist who throws parties in the rundown mansion where she lives. She is rud to have inherited large sums of money, which may have served as motive for her murder. She casts a pall over the novel, and the town. Luismi is a man in a gang who takes in a young teen, Norma, perhaps to hide his homosexual history with an oil company Engineer who is stringing him along. Norma escaped the house where she was impregnated by her stepfather. Brando is a member of Luismi's gang who secretly lusts after Luismi, but while homosexual acts are practiced and abided by the gang for extra money or drugs, true homosexuality appears to be a death sentence. Sex with whomever is present seems an escape from the characters' squalid circumstances. The swirling structure of the book masterfully mimics the swirling form of a hurricane. But the heat wave and drought in the town drive characters crazy, and the frenzy is only relieved by the beginnings of a rainstorm at the book's conclusion. There's no redemption here for anyone, only corruption.
• 
  VICKI HERBERT

  No spoilers. 4 1/2 stars. This story isn't for everybody I'm going to start off with the warnings: graphic sex and violence on almost every page and rampant profanity
  
  The story begins with the dead body of a small Mexican town's resident witch discovered floating in an irrigation canal
  
  The story then digresses and we are given several accounts about what led up to the witch's murder and about the witch itself
  
  The accounts are brutally direct and unflinching which can leave some readers feeling abused and beaten up themselves
  
  If you find yourself slowing to view a bad traffic accident, you'll probably find this a good read because it allows the reader to view the most Intimate and gut wrenching details
  
  If I had to describe this novel overall: it was like reading about one big multi layered orgy of every variety and then some
  
  Some readers may not like the author's style of using long, looooooong sentences but if you stick with it you'll soon learn how to break them at the commas.
  
  I removed half a star due to the avalanche of profanity. If you can take the content, the story is very thought provoking.
  
  Read this story to understand why the witch had to die (and who's zoomin' who).
• 
  rjames

  The book embodies squalor, degradation, violence, corruption and exploitation. It has a deeply buried, thin plotline which is incidental to the depravity of the depiction.
  
  The language is fascinating even though lurid.
  
  Reviews report that the author considered writing this as nonfiction. She should have.
  
  This is not in the vein of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck or Franz Fanon.
• 
  anapurna

  This book heralds a new talent to the world of Latin American fiction. Fernanda Melchor, a Mexican writer and former journalist, has written a jaw clenching account of a murder, an account somewhere between a hypnotic dream and an opium nightmare, of life for the citizens of a dusty, dirty, Mexican town. A town of little hope and even less economic opportunity, the townspeople, are less likely to live their lives than they are to count off the days that make those lives so unbearable. Written in a graphic, expletive laden style, the characters do not so much narrate their day to day concerns, as present them in a horrific guttural inexorable scream. The result is a gripping, sweat soaked read, that leaves the reader questioning what to make of these characters who enter a page or chapter only to morph into another being as a new character narrates the story from a different perspective. The writing seems to vacillate between fiction and non fiction and the author has said she originally thought of writing this as non fiction. The outcome is a kind of literary Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" the iconic cinematic marvel decades ago.
  Some reviewers compare Ms. Melchor to Bolano, or Vasquez, but she is clearly her own person and she nurtures her own voice. She is a major literary force to be reckoned with, hopefully for years to come.
• 
  Jstaf

  The talent of the author is apparent from the start, immediately provoking thoughts of Bolano.
  
  The characters were human, bad and good, trying to survive in a poor area run by criminals and overrun with tragedy and sadness.
  
  Like 2666 this book has parts that are hard to read, but it helps those who have first world problems understand a little better the weight crushing poverty is on people.
• 
  Christine in Long Beach

  While the long, run on sentences brilliantly describe the futility of the character's lives, the constant repetition of their thoughts and feelings make this an unnecessarily tedious read. Unfortunately I can't recommend it.
• 
  HLeuschel

  This is a brutally honest novel about the precarious situation among the poor Mexican population where the vicious cycle between depravity, prostitution, drug addiction and smuggling is parallel with the presence of huge levels of violence and hopelessness. It's a very sad book despite the occasional glimpse of empathy and attempts of community care. Powerful and brave!
• 
  Dave Burch

  This is pretty strong stuff. The unrelentingly tough existence is not easy reading. I liked the way the story unfolds as seen through different eyes, so you see depth in some of the characters than met the reader at first.
  Not my cup of tea but pretty compelling in a rather horrid way.
• 
  Dan Theobald

  It was delivered with tears on the edges and the spine
• 
  neil 28

  Boring and slow. Stuck with it for about 2/3s through. Then binned it!
• 
  Anoushka

  This review is for the product:
  A very beautiful and expensive looking edition of Hurricane Season with great paper quality heavy and crisp and a semi jacketed cover. Got it for a steal at Rs. 384
  Although, The cover is slightly perforated on the sides and has a few dust specks as if it was handled by dirty hands but its not very noticeable. Overall I'm quite happy with my purchase.
  
  Hurricane Season was a nominee for the International Booker Prize. I recommend this to every fan of transgressive literary fiction.