A review by eleanorjmca
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

challenging dark sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is a savage, very bleak book about cycles of violence and pain, centred on one small community; ultimately it is about powerless people, extremely poor, controlled by drugs and gangs and money problems and superstitions and fear above all, who accrue tiny amounts of power to themselves by means of violence against other powerless people. Men, in particular, are the primary aggressors, with women the primary victims, but there is always a sense in which the greater aggressor is off screen, elsewhere, maybe at the Oil Company or even far away in another country. It is a loveless book, full of people desperately looking for affection and approval and vindication, as well as sexual pleasure, but unable to engage with anything in a non-violent way; the close relationship between love and violence runs through the whole book, culminating in the final scene when
the dead bodies receive the most genuinely affectionate words in the book from the gravedigger, having finally "escaped" from the world of suffering
.

This book's best quality is the author's incredible use of language, and the translator's skill in rendering it. The dense text (no paragraph breaks) and eternal run on sentences were off-putting at first, but soon made the book difficult to put down! The technique of going on a journey in each chapter through a particular character's train of thought, memories etc is very compelling. I also loved how the picture of what had happened on the night of the crime, and what had caused it, gradually came into focus through the perspectives of different characters. I have only ust finished this book and I want to go back and read it again! 
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