The amazing thing about Hurricane Season (2017, English translation 2020) is its frantic energy, an electrical storm of words, images and emotions. In a poor part of rural Mexico, a strange character known only as The Witch is murdered. The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, two male and two female, all with their own passions and their own hatreds, their own vocabularies of abuse that they direct at the world around them. In particularly they despise and abuse the opposite sex. The crimes here are all sex crimes, in a broad sense: they are about gender relations, male attempts to control women, female attempts to get something from men, straight scorn for homosexuality, and the rage of men whose machismo is threatened. In one sense it is an indictment of male misdeeds, but it is not preachy; it just turns its electric gaze on awful things, lighting up the horror and the pain of those acts like it lights up everything about its characters' worlds.
I don't recommend it for everyone. It is obscene, profane, confusing, and sometimes grim, but it is the least boring book I have listened to in years.
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