I fell into this book quickly, and adored Melchor's style and the way each chapter enmeshed us in character. And yet, ultimately, I ended up DNFing the book, just past the 75% mark (which is the latest I've ever given up on a book).

As much as the style of this book takes some getting used to, the content is often harder to take. I haven't looked up trigger warnings, but this book probably deserves pretty much all of them. And while for more than the first half of the book I felt like the writing and the topic more than warranted the depth of trauma, focus, and content, I got to a point in the book where it no longer felt justifiable. The book was getting harder to read in terms of the violence and objectionable content, and more and more, it felt like we'd veered into writing that was meant to shock more so than anything. I'm not one for shock value, or for extreme horror in general, and while I'd love the beginning of the book (despite plenty of rough content), I got to a point where I just felt more and more disgusted with the book. So, finally, I put it down.

There's a lot to love about Melchor's work here, her writing talent, and the effects achieved through character immersion and study. Even the interplay of violence, humor, and trauma. But, for me, it got to be too much, and ultimately felt like trauma piled atop of trauma and brought up over and over again for little more than shock value. Once I closed the book, I couldn't bring myself to open it up again.

This isn't actually a book I could recommend to anyone, to be honest. I've given it a three-star rating based on the first half of the book and based on the fact that I trust the judgement of friends in my book club who hold it in higher regard than I do...but I don't see myself ever recommending this one or picking up another work of Melchor's in the future, much as I can acknowledge the talent on display in the writing. ( )

En principio este libro no sonaba como algo que me vaya a gustar, pese a insistentes recomendaciones. Decidì confiar y me encontré con una prosa enfebrecida que hila la historia en capítulos larguísimos de un solo párrafo construido en frases eternas; completamente tomadas por una fuerte jerga mexicana que me es ajena; y en donde se narran acontecimientos de los mas terribles, cargados de violencia, miseria y sufrimiento. Nada de esto suena como algo que normalmente disfrutaría, y sin embargo no podía parar de leer. Me duró un par de días de pura fascinación. Esa prosa que nunca para pareciera estar diseñada para no soltarte, y en vez de abrumar atrapa. Es un retrato crudísimo de la vida en los pueblos del interior de méxico abandonados a la pobreza y la corrupción. ( )

Si se pudiera calificar con seis estrellas, le daría 10. En breve reseña en mi blog. ( )

Bleak and horribly fascinating. The story is actually quite good, and I'd like to recommend it, for its grim uncomfortable pointiness. Unfortunately it employs my least favorite literary technique, the neverending text, clause leading to clause, introducing new topics, tangential to the main subject, sentences that rarely end, one long justified paragraph filling page after page, a girl just waiting for any type of punctuation besides a comma, a short space to breathe, to pick up the threads of story again. It's employed to great effect, but it causes me real anxiety. I read the whole book both because it was good and because I bought it. I could not fully enjoy it. I suspect I'll like the story itself in retrospect. ( )

Straddles a fine line between the blunt prose of Cormac’s Blood Meridian and Hilda Hirst’s poetic ambiguity in her Obscene Madame D; I find it excels Cormac’s attempts at violence but falls short of Hilst’s diffuse excellence. It has a structure consisting of vignettes where one is shoved in front of a polyvalent, almost-barely comprehensible image that is then slowly incorporated into an overall causality. Everything in the book wraps around the smirking, transvestite corpse which is leaking yellow fluid from its head into the river. Yet the work at the same time forces one to contend with and make sense of the silent crack of lightning which emanates from this death, this event which cuts through all of the base materialism which corrupts the Mexican sugar cane crop. There is something enigmatic skirting the boundary, something which is in its own essence purer, that stands in stark contrast to the naturalistic debaucheries the characters themselves carry out. The book comes down to sifting through two heterogenous sources, either one can clear everything up as above-board orgiastic perversities easily reducible to sociological, psychological etc. reasonings, or one can tease out the elusive disparities undergirding the story’s events which point to a malevolent alterity. Good fucking book, way better than I expected it to be (doesn’t feel transgressive/gratuitous just for the sake of it). ( )