RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)... a brutal and relentless novel evidently not written with an American audience in mind ... Melchor refuses to invite comfortable readers to imagine themselves in the situation of her intensely vulnerable characters ... As the plot unfolds, the novel hits a checklist of social ills and hits them so hard that the results at times approach the unreadable. And yet, the book has a ferocious rhetorical and narrative power, a profane colloquial energy that almost serves as a protest against the cruelty it recounts. At times the novel’s style feels close to outpacing the nightmarish world it narrates ... That it never does is Melchor’s greatest challenge to the protocols of ‘literary fiction,’ which tends to recast even the grimmest material as intellectually or morally fortifying. But you’re not going to feel better, or better about yourself, for having read Hurricane Season ... The narrative structure is a marvel of engineering ... readers who want to attain a vivid sense of the Witch’s humanity are forced to interpret these expressions of hatred as the author’s analysis of that intolerance. But Melchor’s narrator is brutally scrupulous in leaving that task to us ... Melchor’s sparse details point us to the ravages of global capital without underlining them ... A sense of entrapment is viscerally relayed by the very look of the page, those seamless paragraph-walls enclosing the events in a typographic prison ... Our culture has produced a lot of language lately about toxic masculinity, but rarely have the hydraulics of that phenomenon been so precisely analyzed ... Perhaps what most sets Hurricane Season apart from other contemporary fictions of abandonment is its refusal to sentimentalize the work that literature does ... The enclosure of the novel’s world puts enormous pressure on Melchor’s language: the book’s propulsive style, replete with profanity and Veracruzan slang, is charged with making the novel’s cruelty endurable. In this, Melchor succeeds stunningly: the book is at once repellent and transfixing. Sophie Hughes’s impressive translation meets a daunting challenge with energy and inventiveness; the rhythm of her prose matches the fervor of Melchor’s original...In places, though, Hughes’s choices inflect the novel’s tone in odd ways ... In the unforgiving environment of Hurricane Season, where viciously contemptuous language renders an unthinkably brutal story, Melchor’s moments of stylistic neutrality provide a kind of baseline of solemnity, even of dignity. There’s reason to miss them ... remains a powerful experience for the way its cruelty becomes, improbably, and before our eyes, a form of radically intransigent egalitarianism. While more conventional writers advertise their moral delicacy in dealing with vastly disempowered characters, Melchor’s relentlessness makes that strategy look like condescension. Hewing close to her painful material – and refusing to let her narrator philosophize about it or apologize for it – Melchor reveals something distasteful in the common notion that the task of fiction is to ‘convey the humanity’ of people in extreme circumstances. Hurricane Season demands instead that we assume the humanity of its characters. Is there a better condition of entry for a novel to set its readers?
