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Lark Benobi's Reviews > Hurricane Season
Hurricane Season
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Hurricane Season compels me to examine my own belief system about literature and to make sure it's defensible, and to conclude, probably not.
The prose is gorgeous. The story is ugly. The author relentlessly degrades and debases her characters. Their moments of respite from their lives of squalor, violence, and brutishness are nearly non-existent.
Even so, this story, written in neat letters across the pages, is so much less awful than the reality of women being murdered and mutilated in Mexico at an accelerated rate each year and without any consequence meted out to their murderers. The squalor and horror in this book are the faintest echo of the truth, about something happening far away from me. The beauty of the sentences shields me from the facts. However ugly the story, it's just a story. I'm sitting in my comfortable chair as I read it. The effect is harrowing, but temporary. It's like those precisely lit photojournalistic images of war and famine victims--I'm moved, and then I move on.
I disliked how much the novel disturbed me, though, even if this story is so much less disturbing than the nonfiction version of this story. I wanted more beauty. The beauty of the sentences themselves wasn't enough. I wanted a glimpse of what's lost, when human life is valued so cheaply. I hated that there is no air or hope or light in the novel. The characters behave like wild animals trapped in a vicious lab experiment where they are deprived of all love and hope until in desperation they start chewing their paws off to comfort themselves.
So I end up realizing that I need some sort of redemptive moment in my fiction--even if it's a lie.
The prose is gorgeous. The story is ugly. The author relentlessly degrades and debases her characters. Their moments of respite from their lives of squalor, violence, and brutishness are nearly non-existent.
Even so, this story, written in neat letters across the pages, is so much less awful than the reality of women being murdered and mutilated in Mexico at an accelerated rate each year and without any consequence meted out to their murderers. The squalor and horror in this book are the faintest echo of the truth, about something happening far away from me. The beauty of the sentences shields me from the facts. However ugly the story, it's just a story. I'm sitting in my comfortable chair as I read it. The effect is harrowing, but temporary. It's like those precisely lit photojournalistic images of war and famine victims--I'm moved, and then I move on.
I disliked how much the novel disturbed me, though, even if this story is so much less disturbing than the nonfiction version of this story. I wanted more beauty. The beauty of the sentences themselves wasn't enough. I wanted a glimpse of what's lost, when human life is valued so cheaply. I hated that there is no air or hope or light in the novel. The characters behave like wild animals trapped in a vicious lab experiment where they are deprived of all love and hope until in desperation they start chewing their paws off to comfort themselves.
So I end up realizing that I need some sort of redemptive moment in my fiction--even if it's a lie.
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Reading Progress
December 6, 2022
–
Started Reading
December 6, 2022
– Shelved
December 7, 2022
– Shelved as:
2022
December 7, 2022
– Shelved as:
words-without-borders
December 7, 2022
– Shelved as:
mexico
December 7, 2022
– Shelved as:
hispanohablante
December 7, 2022
–
Finished Reading
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Emily
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rated it 3 stars
Dec 07, 2022 09:50AM
This was pretty much exactly my take.
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Emily wrote: "This was pretty much exactly my take."I was a little troubled by my own take. It's adjacent to the people who need happy endings or likable characters in their fiction.
But then I put myself through the exercise of remembering how many great, great books I've read about horrible stories. BUT the authors allowed just the smallest chink of light and hope into their stories, and the contrast made the stories stronger, and I felt the pity of it so much more. Fatelessness by Imre Kertész. Jude the Obscure. The Grapes of Wrath.
I've always loved the raw candor and vulnerability in your reviews, Lark, but this is one of your best! I had a similar experience recently with a movie I found beautiful and haunting, but whose ending was so dismally bleak and cynical that I just couldn't fully embrace what the filmmakers seemed to be saying. I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment above. Like you, I need at least "the smallest chink of light and hope," even in the darkest stories.
James, I've thought about this a lot lately. It's because I know, and I've been told many times, that as a writer I'd do better if I wrote toward the direction of "dark and twisted" with a vengeance, vs. whatever it is that I do--which to be honest can be fairly dark and twisted but it also has this smallest chink of light and hope in there. Always. Anyway. I've pretty much made up my mind that redemption is a requirement of the fiction I value. Even Elie Wiesel's work has it. It's so easy to shock. It's so easy to write cynically. It's so easy to write about ugliness. I'm tired of those kinds of books.
Yikes! I had wanted to read this book, but I obviously didn't know enough about it til now. So, I'm going to pass. Lark, I'm sorry it affected you the way it did, but I understand, and I appreciate you saving me from that distress. I believe most people would like at least a glimmer of hope in the difficult books they read. Take care.🌹
Thank you for such a deeply felt review, Lark. You eloquently stated what I felt when reading this work. I love that you were able to depict the suffocating quality and hopelessness so well. I felt prudish that I did not like this work more so your comment about being adjacent to people who need happy endings or likeable characters hit home.
Daniel, sometimes with a book like this, I start to wonder: "why am I reading this? What is its purpose?"When fiction is written to be so unrelentingly violent and hopeless then it's not telling me anything I don't know already about us humans in the world.
I seem to believe that fiction has a different purpose. Maybe even what I'd call "a higher calling."
I’ve really enjoyed reading your reviews over the last few months, thank you 🌻
Thanks for letting me know, Alexandra. It took me a while to realize that I get a lot more satisfaction from writing ‘how it made me feel’ types of reviews, musings that aren’t really judgments at all of the work in and of itself. I’ve also started to realize there is no such thing as ‘the work in and of itself,’ actually, because a book is a brick until someone reads it.
Jodi wrote: "Yikes! I had wanted to read this book, but I obviously didn't know enough about it til now. So, I'm going to pass."I was going to make a very similar comment, Jodi. Somebody I respect must also have read it and rated it highly which motivated me to add it, but Lark's review makes me near certain it'll be way too much for me.
Jodi and Beth, I think you'll know by the end of the first chapter. I kept reading because I expected there to be a turn somewhere, and there was a small gesture toward a turn, but it wasn't enough for me. I had a similar experience with Nightcrawling and these books have both had a huge impact on readers, and great success in the literary market, so obvs some people have a different and more expansive and accepting way of reading these books than I do.
YES!!!! I can appreciate and relate to your beautiful review even more now. Had a very similar reaction to yours, and also feel similarly conflicted about that reaction at the same time. I'm like a little kid who isn't afraid to go to sleep in the dark, as long as there's even just the faintest stream of light coming in from the hallway night-light.
