I did report the post with animorph spoilers, guilty as charged. However, I didn’t think the flag button actually worked so in that sense I am totally innocent
I read this review of hurricane season
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n06/adam-mars-jones/muffled-barks-muted-yelps
and found the closing paragraph interesting (disagreed strongly)
“The goal of making the reader as powerless to contest the impact of the narrative as the characters are to resist their circumstances is undesirable as well as impractical. Reading can’t and shouldn’t become an ‘ineluctable modality’ (a phrase in Ulysses derived from Aristotle), something impossible to keep out, like the visual impressions received by an open-sighted eye. In literature readerly freedom is not something for technique to overcome but the medium through which technique operates, however extreme the material.”
It’s a mostly appreciative review, but ends with this weird (in my opinion) rejection and claim. I don’t understand when it’s appropriate in sort of a moral sense to withhold sense/experience description from the reader with regard to real world, actually-existing bad stuff. There are definitely questions about taste/effectiveness and exploitation - I don’t think “seriousness” is in question in Hurricane Season. And it’s less “techincal” than eden eden eden which I suppose would be a point of comparison. Another comparison would be those long descriptive passages in theodore dreiser - there are good reasons to build detail after detail in a text even if the effect is upsetting. Not quite getting why an author should have to be concerned with giving the reader a pressure release valve when they have as eminently a “good reason” to be recounting what’s being recounted as melchor does in hurricane season.
Also suspect that the dialed up vulgarity of the english translation might give the impression that the text is less “journalistic” and more “in your face” than the spanish is. So maybe that’s part of the “problem” as the reviewer sees it