User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
My Book of the year 2020 Shortlisted for 2020 International Booker Prize
It’s violent, it’s grim, the language is dirty, the prose is intense, there is rape, minor abuse, sex, drugs, murder, violence towards homosexuals, poverty, whores, lots of booze, too much of everything that should disgust me. However, I could not stop reading, I was in trance every time I opened my kindle, It was like I was the one on drugs not the characters. I had a heaviness in my chest while I was reading most of this short novel. A book that makes you feel so uncomfortable and unpleasant but also mesmerizes you and locks you in, deserves all the stars (and the Booker International prize as a bonus. ). From the 4 titles that I’ve read so far this is my favorite.
The novel is written around the brutal murder of a witch in a nightmarish village somewhere in Mexico. In each of the 8 chapters the story is told from the point of view of one character who has more or less something to do with the murder or knows a characters that was involved in the violence.
Ps.1 Here is an interview of the Author where she admits that she got inspired to write the novel from a real story read in a newspaper.
Rating: really liked it
That was so far removed from my comfort zone, I now need to watch the Disney channel for a month.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars
“They say the heat’s driven the locals crazy, that it’s not normal — May and not a single drop of rain — and that the hurricane season’s coming hard, that it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all that bleakness: decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled-up, bagged-up bodies dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town.”It is so often the children who suffer the consequences of poverty and a corrupt system. And these are the characters my heart bled for, because that’s really what they are… just children. Children that have been thrust into adulthood too quickly, children that have been abused, children whose parents have forsaken them due to their own miserable lives. And we all know that not only does misery love company, misery begets more misery.
The novel begins with the discovery of a body in the canal – the body of one that is called Witch. The witch has suffered a gruesome death, and from the beginning I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged through the hopeless and merciless streets of a small Mexican rural town. I was consumed by the tempest until I was finally disgorged at the graveside, gasping for breath. It’s savage, tragic, and violently graphic. I couldn’t set it down.
“… La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho…”A deadly hurricane had changed not just the landscape of this town, but the lives of the people as well. A town already gripped by superstition and the plagues of poverty is thrust further into the depths of its fears. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and acts of violence are perpetuated by a degenerate patriarchal system, a crooked police force, and the ruthless drug lords. Children are exploited, forced to care for their siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents. They in turn are caught in the whirlwind and beaten down, turning to booze, weed, pills, and sex (in all of its myriad variations) to combat their loneliness and helplessness.
“… there was something evil and terrible inside her for wanting that contact, that crude embrace, and for wanting it to last forever…”The structure of this novel is skilled and very effective at moving the plot forward. Each chapter has a different voice. Each is told from the perspective of a character either involved in the murder, a witness to that murder, or someone who has been in close proximity to one of the perpetrators of this vicious crime. Motives for the murder are revealed. In the process the reader is subjected to sexually explicit violence, perversions, and obscenities. None of it ever felt gratuitous, however, and for this I applaud Fernanda Melchor. Stark realism is never obstructed by cheap melodrama.
This book is cheerless, uncomfortable, and fierce; yet I highly recommend it for anyone that has even the slightest curiosity about it. I felt I was given a grim but authentic portrait of a culture that is steeped in the darkest of torments. Is it possible that only in death is one truly freed from the trials of human suffering? If you are easily offended or faint-of-heart, then perhaps you will want to steer clear of this one. On my part, I can say that it is a riveting, remarkable piece of writing, and I hope that we will see more of Melchor’s work in translation very soon.
Rating: really liked it
From my review in the Irish Times: Fernanda Melchor’s first novel to appear in English is an insane wall of text, a phalanx of prose rallied between the margins with strict orders to destroy the reader. Hurricane Season is the story of the Witch and her power over the inhabitants of the Mexican village of La Matosa. Melchor’s extremely graphic prose throughout would have Georges Bataille himself reaching for a crucifix but it is a commendation of translator Sophie Hughes that the novel never reads like cheap smut. It is often beautiful, often harrowing, and deeply affecting while . Almost instantly hailed as a modern classic of Mexican literature upon its publication, Hurricane Season can finally unleash its torrent upon English-language readers. Quite the apt title.
Rating: really liked it
Hurricane Season is a portrait of a Mexican town crushed by violence, poverty, trauma, and degradation. It is an oppressive, suffocating, headlong rush of a novel.
The murder of the town ‘witch’ is at the eye of this maelstrom, written in dizzying, long, run-on sentences and whorls of revolving narrative. This style gives the novel its breathless, exhilarating pace: a ‘hurricane’ of words.
The crime is a pretext for examining the tangential lives of the townspeople. Each chapter begins in media res with a different character, details their history of hurt, then circles back to where the chapter began. It is a litany of extreme poverty, abuse, subjugation of every kind; of marginalised, abandoned and forgotten people engaging in the self-obliteration that is their only recourse.
While impressive, the novel—for me—was not a complete success. My criticisms are a bit paltry in the face of this book’s intensity and fierce motives, but I will state them anyway. The characters were not well individuated—Melchor depicts these people mainly as vehicles for trauma, the sum-total of their circumstances. Their unresolved fates make the book feel unfinished, rather than seeming like a meaningful choice. And while the writing (and translation) is brilliant, there were occasional misfires, for instance:
“he yowled like the dogs that drag themselves, run-over but still breathing, to the roadside”. It’s a book full of nightmarish realism; in this scene where a man won’t stop screaming, appending a nightmarish simile felt like overkill to me.
It’s an accomplishment regardless, a brutal story that needed telling. Melchor has an urgent voice, intense and powerful, and I hope to see more of her work in English translation.
Rating: really liked it
At the centre of “Hurricane Season” is a mysterious murder in a small Mexican village. The locals only referred to this notorious individual who is found floating dead in a body of water as “The Witch”. There are tales that she hoarded vast quantities of rare coins and valuable jewels in her home, that she had mystical powers to cast spells and that she regularly hosted depraved orgies. This makes her a figure of high intrigue as well as a target for violence. The novel gives a series of accounts from several individuals who were acquainted with the Witch and gradually explains the dramatic events and circumstances which lead to her death. Many of these characters are mere adolescents or teenagers engaged in very adult situations. In reading the dizzying fervour of their stories we get a wider view of this deeply troubled community and receive the author’s stealthy commentary upon it. It’s utterly hypnotic, gripping and filled with dexterous storytelling.
Read my full review of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor on LonesomeReader
Rating: really liked it
Now longlisted for the International BookerTemporada de huracanes by Fernanda Melchor has been translated as Hurricane Season by Sophie Hughes, and published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This is the fourth translation from Hughes I've read, the others being:
The allegorical but visceral The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse by Iván Repila
The Booker International shortlisted The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán
and An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo
and this maintains the excellent quality and is a strong contender to feature in the International Booker. Indeed the importance and quality of the book - both in the original and translation - is evidenced by the blurbs from Claire-Louise Bennett, Jon McGregor, Ben Lerner, Alvaro Enrique, Samanta Schweblin, Yuri Herrera, Alia Trabucco Zeran and Jesse Ball, who comments: ‘Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.’ El Pais recently featured the book as one of the 21 best novels, in Spanish or translated to Spanish of the 21st century to date (https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/11/26...) - the top 2 being 2666 and Austerlitz.
In an interview (https://www.dw.com/en/nightmarish-rea...) Melchor explains the origin of the novel, which originally she'd intended as a non-fictional novel in the footsteps of In Cold Blood, but which she later decided to turn to her own fictional story:
Fernanda Melchor: When I was living in Veracruz, I worked for a social communications office of my university, and we got all the local and regional papers from Veracruz. Much of the news had to do with violence and crime in the area — crimes of passion committed by normal people. And I saw this small newspaper chronicle that talked about a person found dead in a canal in a small village next to where I was.
I was surprised because the journalist told the story in a way that made it sound normal to think that a crime could be motivated by witchcraft… The murderer had killed the witch because she was doing witchcraft to make him fall back in love with her. I was stunned by this and I just wanted to write the story behind the crime.
. See also https://www.cunning-folk.com/book-clu...
The crime of this novel is revealed in the opening pages - the murder of a women known as The Witch:
They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Young Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some time-worn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the old crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else. She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the Witch wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even just to sit still under the table so that she could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their snivelling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was almost always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway, and why do they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d blub, what was the point of it all, they’d moan, they might as well be dead, just call it a day, wished they’d never been born, and with the corner of their shawls they’d dry the tears from their faces, which they covered in any case the moment they left the Witch’s kitchen, because they weren’t about to give those bigmouths in town the satisfaction of going around saying how they’d been to see the Witch to plot their revenge against so-and-so, how they’d put a curse on the slut leading their husband astray, because there was always one, always some miserable bitch in town spinning yarns about the girls who, quite innocently, minding their own business, went to the Witch’s for a remedy for indigestion for that dipshit at home clogged up to his nuts on the kilo of crisps he ate in one sitting, or a tea to keep tiredness at bay, or an ointment for tummy troubles, or, let’s be honest, just to sit there awhile and lighten the load, let it all out, the pain and sadness that fluttered hopelessly in their throats. The elder Witch initially gained her reputation when her husband Manolo Condes (she was his 2nd wife) died - ostensibly of a heart attack but his step-sons were vocally unconvinced, only to swiftly meet an untidy end themselves:
An evil woman, it turned out, because, who knows how, some say with the devil in her ear, she had learned of a herb that grew wild up in the mountains, almost at the summit, among the old ruins that, according to those suits from the government, were the ancient tombs of men who’d once lived up there, the first dwellers, there even before those filthy Spaniards who, from their boats, took one look at all that land spread out before them and said finders keepers, this land belongs to us and to the Kingdom of Castile; and the ancients, the few who were left, had to run for the hills and they lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78, what with the landslide, the avalanche of mud that swamped more than a hundred locals from La Matosa and the ruins where those herbs were said to grow, the herbs that the Witch boiled up into an odourless, colourless poison so imperceptible that even the doctor from Villa concluded Manolo had died of a heart attack, but those pig-headed sons of his swore blind that he’d been poisoned, and later everyone blamed the Witch for the sons’ deaths too, because on the very same day they buried their father, the devil came and took them on the highway, on their way to the cemetery in Villa, heading up the funeral procession; the pair of them died crushed under a stack of metal joists that slid off the truck in front; blood-smeared steel all over the next day’s papers, the whole thing more than a little creepy because no one could explain how such a thing could have happened, how those joists had come loose from the fastening cable and smashed through the windscreen, skewering them both, and there was no shortage of people who put two and two together and blamed the Witch, who said the Witch had put a curse on them, that the evil wench had sold her soul to the devil in exchange for special powers, all to hold on to the house and surrounding land, and it was around then that the Witch locked herself away in the house never to leave again, not by day or night, perhaps for fear the Condes were waiting to take their revenge, or maybe because she was hiding something, a secret she couldn’t let out of her sight, something in the house that she refused to leave unguarded, and she grew thin and pale and just looking her in the eyes sent a chill through you because it was clear she’d gone mad, and it was the women of La Matosa who brought her food in exchange for her help preparing their lotions and potions, concoctions brewed either with the herbs that the Witch grew in her vegetable garden or with the wild plants she sent the women to forage on the mountainside, back when there was still a mountainside to speak of. Rumours spreads that the Witch had, in her large house, inherited from Manolo,
hidden somewhere, or so the story went, the money, a shedload of gold coins that Don Manolo had inherited from his father and never banked, not forgetting the diamond, the diamond ring that no one had ever seen, not even the sons, but that was said to hold a stone so big it looked fake. Following her mother's death in a hurricane-induced landslide, the Young Witch inherits her clientele and sorcery, but also hosts wild drug-fuelled parties with the local youth.
At the novel’s heart are four single-paragraph chapters, with labyrinthine sentences, each written from the perspective of one of the characters involved in the events:
- Yesenia, a young woman, who saw her drug addicted cousin Luismi carrying the Witch from her house with one of his friends, Brando.
- Munra, Luismi’s stepfather, who drove the them away
- Norma, a girl who fled her abusive stepfather and moved in with Luismi
- Brando
Yesenia reports what she sees to the police, who are more interested in finding what happened to the rumoured treasure than what happened to the victim. And the story the characters tells is one of violence, sexual promiscuity, abuse, drugs and poverty, but also one where the grim reality of modern life is intertwined with folklore.
4 stars
Rating: really liked it
FINAL REVIEW: AAAAH. The punchy prose and frenetic energy of Hurricane Season reminded me of three novels: 2666, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Milkman. 2666: because of its panoramic depiction of the socio-economic violence in contemporary Mexico, especially the tendency towards femicide. Seven Killings: because of the unapologetic use of animated and arresting language, not giving a damn if the reader can catch up. You’re a prisoner, you can’t look away from the horrific imagery, and it sweeps you up for the ride of your life. Similarly to Milkman, this book goes back and forth on colorful tangents, bringing you right back to where you started. With a narrative that feels claustrophobic, riddled with tension, which causes you to tremble with unease. You might just forget to breathe, and it’s all so exhilarating.
It starts off with a murder; a sinister and gruesome discovery of a rotting corpse by a band of local boys. The victim is The Witch, a mysterious figure in the village; a symbol of both fear and respect. The most fascinating element is what we learn about the Witch as the novel unfolds in all its nightmarish glory. Each chapter peels away another layer of the Witch, and by doing so, also manages to shine a light on contemporary social issues. By the time you reach the end, The Witch is nothing like what you initially suspected. It’s easy (and lazy) to paint every character as a scumbag and leave it as that. Each character is representative of the disenfranchised members of society; those who are messed up by the system, those who have been told they don’t matter.
Themes galore in this novel: violence, misogyny, homophobia, greed, corruption, police brutality, superstition, sexuality, rape, self-hatred, fetishes, rumors, poverty, pedophilia, and prejudice. Things you can expect to feel while reading this book: Shock, awe, breathlessness, exasperation, anger, terror, admiration, and nauseous (that one scene ughhh --you’ll know what scene).
One of the best books I’ve ever laid my eyes on. FEARLESS. 🔥
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-VbMRFgn...
Rating: really liked it
They say she never really died, because witches don’t go without a fight. They say that, at the last minute, just before those kids stabbed her, she transformed into something else: a lizard or a rabbit, which scurried away and took cover in the heart of the bush. Or into the giant raptor that appeared in the sky in the days following the murder.
Hurricane Season ~~ Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season was suggested to me by my friend
Dani. Knowing my love for
Roberto Bolaño, Dani thought I would enjoy this read; he was right. I did get off to a rough start with this one, but in the end,
Melchor’s writing won me over.
At its core,
Hurricane Season is a murder mystery; one that's told through the thoughts and voices of the inhabitants of a small village, La Matosa.
Hurricane Season exposes the shattered dreams of a community hit by widespread violence, drug addiction, sexual abuse and financial hardships.
Melchor is strongly influenced by
Spillane,
Capote,
Bolaño and
García Márquez among other writers here to create a masterful novel that is ultimately written in her own voice ~~ and what a powerful voice it is.
Hurricane Season tells the tales of a cast of characters, whose collective testimonies discuss the murder of the Witch. Her corpse is discovered in a canal on the opening page by five boys who see her face as she floats dead in a body of water. The novel’s timeline alternates between perspectives which tell the reader who the Witch was and why she was murdered. These perspectives gradually come together to produce overwhelming discord ~~ shedding more darkness than light on what has taken place.
Melchor masterfully captures, the sexual abuse committed by men and the ways in which they also abuse one another.
Witchcraft, here, serves as a way to mythologize the forces that justify violence. The Witch ~~ whose gender and sexuality change depending upon who is speaking about her ~~ becomes the focal point of the town’s wants and desires. The Witch is both savior and devil in La Matosa.
To the men of La Matosa ~~ the same men who attend the orgies the Witch hosts ~~ she is the devil. It is widely believed that the Witch’s mother and Satin fucked to bring her forth into the world. In reality, the Witch is conceived by an attack on her mother when she is raped by several men.
Melchor explores toxic masculinity and the everyday sins it condones ~~ but Melchor takes this a step further ~~ she shows the reader how toxic masculinity not only effects women, but also how it traps and destroys men as well.
Here, homosexual desires are widespread yet stifled or justified through twisted reasoning ~~ by closing your eyes and pretending you’re with a woman, or getting a few beers ~~
Man, don’t tell me you’ve never been sucked off by a fag … they give you the head of your life and then pay you for the pleasure and buy you as many drinks as you like after. In Melchor’s world, homophobia, misogyny, and poverty create the hurricane of violence.
And yet, in the end,
Hurricane Season is not just about violence, but also survival. How do we survive when there are no Witches around, when there are no spells being cast to save us? How do we exist in a world where love and affection do not exist?
Rating: really liked it
3.5, rounded down.
This is a difficult one for me to rate and talk about - it's one that I could 'appreciate' and admire, rather than enjoy - the closest equivalent I can compare it to is the films of Tarantino - while I can see the artistry involved, I just don't much LIKE them. The story is compelling and involving, but also relentlessly unpleasant, violent and ugly ... and at several points is downright nauseating.
What worked for me is the quick pace and how the story evolved elliptically - each chapter is told from a different perspective, and things that are initially opaque or confusing are circled around to later on, and then suddenly make sense. The whole milieu of the seedy town and the downtrodden characters is strongly evoked, and gave me a sense of a place to which I would never otherwise be exposed (thankfully).
What didn't work so well, other than the aforementioned grotesquerie, is the fact that each chapter, some running 50+ pages, is composed of a single paragraph, even though topics are changed frequently and dialogue is sometimes involved, and sentences can also often stretch for several pages - this increasingly seems to be a modern fad that I devoutly wish would cease immediately. I hate having to get halfway through a sentence, lose my way because it becomes so convoluted, and have to backtrack repeatedly. Also, the unrelenting homo/transphobia on virtually every page grated ... necessary, perhaps, to tell the story, but also dispiriting to this queer reader.
Not exactly sorry I read it, and it seems to be a favorite to win the International Booker this year - since I haven't read any of the others, I can't really judge, but I would hope that there is another book in the shortlist that shows a better side of humanity.
Rating: really liked it
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020! I should really stop judging books by their titles. Because I picked this book and thought, "you know what? This is going to be about a hurricane that sweeps away a little town or a village and obviously I'm going to be subjected to the altered dynamics of a dysfunctional family" (groans in exasperation). Well, sue me. Of course a Booker shortlisted book wasn't going to be about a damn clothesline getting swept away by a hurricane, thereby forcing all of the villagers to live in a nudist society.
Oh no, this is much dirtier. This book is so filthy, it would make Henry Miller cower. Make no mistake: this is no erotica. It's a dark, nefarious, salacious tale full of drugs, abuse - both physical and emotional, rape, pedophilia, bestiality, misogyny, homophobia and murder. It's not even much of a tale, really. It's more a force to be reckoned with. It's also part murder mystery - the murder of a queer witch, with each chapter offering a new perspective on the crime. It takes so much of the evil from this world and ambushes you with it. It challenges every bit of that incorrigible Aristotelian virtue you have ingrained into yourself and makes you wonder what would become of this society if humans are left completely free to exercise all of their malevolent desires - really, this book will make you squirm, at every page and almost at every sentence. But fear not! It does offer a conclusion, of sorts.
Don’t you worry, don’t fret, you just lie there, that’s it. The sky flashed with lightning and a muffled boom shook the earth. The rain can’t hurt you now, and the darkness doesn’t last forever. See there? See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole.Kids, only pick this book if you are willing to tango with the dark side. You'll wonder why such a book was shortlisted for the International Booker prize until you realize that in making you uncomfortable and disgusted, this book has served its purpose.
4.5 stars
Rating: really liked it
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020This is another very difficult book to rate and review - it is undoubtedly an impressive feat of writing and translation, but it is hard to derive pleasure from reading such an intense, brutal, savage book.
In her acknowledgments, Melchor mentions being inspired by The Autumn of the Patriarch, which I also found very hard work. This book echoes its chapter long paragraphs consisting mostly of very long sentences - there are only 8 chapters, and the first of these and the last two are very short. The book is not for the squeamish, as violence, sex and expletives appear throughout.
Each of the longer chapters follows a different character, and the linking event is the brutal murder of a so called witch in a bungled attempted robbery. The village of La Matosa is a bleak and hopeless place, and its atmosphere is brilliantly evoked.
Rating: really liked it
Holy fuck.

Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated. You drop your guard for a second and they’ll crush you, Clarita, so you better just tell that fuckwit out there to buy you some clothes. Don’t you be anybody’s fool, that’s what men are like: a bunch of lazy spongers who you have to keep rounding up to squeeze any use out of them…
From 1993 to 2005, there were more than 370 female murders (femicides or
feminicidios) in Juárez; in Mexico more broadly, between 1986 and 2009, there were an estimated 34,000 female homicides. And this number is likely much higher: although the far-from-reputable UK
Sun estimates the Juárez total to be around 1,500, this number is likely closer to the truth: as
The Guardian reported in February 2020: there were “119 homicides in the city [of Juárez] during January this year, and 46 to date in February. Last weekend alone counted 18 murders.”

With frenzy, darkness, and unimpeded rage, Fernanda Melchor’s
Hurricane Season dissects Mexico’s culture of—as one narrator puts it—“the full, brutal force of male vice,” after a figure known as “the Witch” is murdered in a small, impoverished village. (Although the novel isn’t set in Juárez, but in her native Veracruz, Melchor speaks to, about, and for all women in Mexico.) Her prose is heady, dizzying, and unrelentingly brutal, depicting how men speak both to and about women, how boys are raised from a young age to feel their superiority over women and “poofs”—in addition to the femicide statistics above, far more than 1,000 documented cases of homophobic violence in Mexico have been recorded—and also how women talk to other women, knowing their bodies are both currency and yet also what make them moving targets in a world where the government and the police care more about money than justice.
Melchor follows the aftermath of the Witch’s murder by fragmenting the narrative, showing us seven unreliable figural narrators who have some part of the backstory to lend to our understanding of what took place. And even that understanding, that “truth,” shifts, morphs, becomes buried beneath misogyny, male privilege, homophobia, and a culture that glorifies violence as evidence of
machismo. It’s also a culture that buries truths quite easily beneath superstition and local mythologies: “the black magic rituals and superstitious beliefs which, to the town’s shame, abounded in that place.”
Hurricane Season is a brave, unflinching book, but certainly not an easy one to stomach; all the same, it is essential reading to begin to understand and to give voice to the thousands of women who have been killed by men in Mexico. Melchor’s prose is akin to Bolaño meeting Krasznahorkai in heated conversation with Faulkner, and the darkness here is the darkness of men breeding violence among each other, with women as the casualties.
Melchor’s book is an angry war cry against a culture that praises men for being men; a culture whose victims are forgotten and forever rendered silent; and a culture in which women–who have also internalized this male violence—need to instruct young girls about the violence they will surely encounter in a world one wishes were a nightmare, not the reality that it is.
Rating: really liked it
Run-on sentences and run-on vulgarity. If that's your thing.
Sixty-page paragraphs with plenty of colons and semi-colons, sometimes a couple of each in a pages-long sentence. The point, I think, was to appear inventive, or maybe grating.
Graphic in the detail. Menstruation and masturbation. Check and check. Homemade abortion. Check. Vaginal, oral and anal sex. Check, check, check. Homosexual sex down to (we are assured) the frenulum. Check. Incest with a minor. Check. Bestiality. Woof. Murder by strangulation and stabbing. Check. Police torture, prostitution, drugs. All checks. Actual employment (any male will do). Uh, no.
I hope I haven't plot-spoiled.
I'm weary, wondering if this is what literature will be post-apocalypse.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 well that was a humdinger! I need some sort of therapy now...
( I believe my original intention was to write a proper review but I find that words fail me on this one, I liked it so much, and yet the experience of reading it is both intense and ghastly. I doubt I will read another book so electrifying this year. And yet I find it hard to say exactly why this appealed to me so much. I do intend to reread this at some point in the future but I can't go through that again right now! )
