Publishers Weekly
04/17/2023
Brazilian writer Vieira Júnior’s alluring English-language debut traces the lives of twin sisters in rural Brazil after a catastrophic accident. Belonísia and Bibiana, five years old, discover an ivory-handled knife hidden by their grandmother. They each put the knife in their mouths, then fight over it, and one of them loses a tongue (it’s not immediately clear which of them it is). In the first part, Bibiana chronicles the farm labor, religious practices, and struggles of their family and neighbors in Água Negra, their remote community of Black subsistence farmers, and offers impressionistic views of the girls’ healer father: “He’d speak differently, he’d sing and whirl with wonderful agility around the room, endowed with the powers of the spirits of the forest, the waters, the mountains, the air.” The second part, narrated by Belonísia, picks up with the twins as young adults, revealing the limited choices they have for marriage and the dignity they scrape together. In the third act, a folkloric spirit named Santa Rita the Fisherwoman joins the twins to share secrets of their grandmother’s past involving the hidden knife. Vieira Júnior conveys the girls’ childhood confusion and wonder in hypnotic prose, and he brings the close-knit Água Negra to life. This heralds the arrival of a welcome voice. (June)
From the Publisher
"An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending."
—International Booker Prize 2024
"[Brazil's] deep-rooted racial and economic injustices are laid bare in one of the most celebrated Brazilian debut novels of recent times."
—Financial Times Best Books of the Year 2023
"A leading voice among the Black authors who have jolted Brazil’s literary establishment in recent years with imaginative and searing works that have found commercial success and critical acclaim"
—New York Times
"One of the great novels of the year..."
—João Céu e Silva, Diário de Notícias
"A tour de force of injustice, tragedy, affection and human dignity reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Vieira Júnior’s book garnered top literary prizes in Portugal and Brazil. Its author has drawn comparisons to Jorge Amado, the giant of Brazilian letters who introduced the magic and plight of Afro-Brazilians to the world."
—Americas Quarterly
"Beautiful, powerful and moving, he presents us with great literature with a simplicity that torments"
—Pessoa Magazine
"Vieira Junior conveys the girls' childhood confusion and wonder in hypnotic prose, and he brings the close-knit Água Negra to life. This heralds the arrival of a welcome voice."
—Publishers Weekly
"Among the laudable feats Vieira Junior accomplishes in this novel is the way it gradually moves from a highly specific story to one with implications for a region's entire working class. A stirring, lived-in novel of struggles both personal and societal."
—starred review, Kirkus Reviews
"Crooked Plow is a powerful novel set among a Black Brazilian farming community living on the edge of existence, whose people are resilient against historical forces and the individuals who oppress them…Each of the novel's three parts has a different narrator, including Bibiana, Belonísia, and an encantada. These respective narrators lead to rich interiority; the characterizations are deep, and the novel is layered in its rendering of events. The sometimes nonchronological narration goes back in time to reveal people's secrets, building suspense as it moves toward its unsettling, fitting conclusion."
—Foreword Reviews
"This powerful debut novel charts the plight of Brazil's poorest farmers scrabbling for subsistence on the land their enslaved ancestors worked. Initially centered on two sisters whose lives are changed forever by a catastrophic accident, the book explores themes of generational poverty and political strife through the lens of family bonds and the eyes of a once-revered Afro-Brazilian divinity. A bestseller in Brazil and lauded with literary accolades, the engrossing story gives visibility to many who have traditionally been marginalized."
—Becky Meloan, The Washington Post
"Vivid ... a saga that tells not just the story of two siblings, but the enduring dysfunction of a nation."
—Oliver Basciano, ArtReview
"A compelling chronicle ... Junior provides an immensely readable account of how men and women of no property have to deal with domestic, economic and state violence and of how story and language restore the dignity such people are so often denied"
—Michael Cronin, Irish Times
"Magic, social realism, and deep character studies grounded in a complex community are the hallmarks of this brilliant novel from a rising voice in Brazil."
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
"A potential heir to the great Clarice Lispector, Vieira Junior, a Bahian native, sets his first story to appear in English among poor Afro-Brazilian tenant farmers...a contemporary Brazilian masterpiece."
—The Center for Fiction
"Five years after it was first published, 'the most important Brazilian novel of the century so far' finally makes its English-language debut. Believe the hype."
—Patrick Rapa, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Itamar Vieira Junior offers a salt-of-the-earth paean...a compelling vision of history's downtrodden and neglected."
—Anderson Tepper, The New York Times Book Review
"Crooked Plow, with artistic clarity and beauty, presents racism and the spectre of slavery as the source of strife in the lives of contemporary Quilombolas ... A provocation to those who believe that simple perseverance will save the day."
—Angel Lambo, Frieze
"[Crooked Plow] is rooted ... in the voices and languages of the sertão, in the names of the animals and plants, in the oral storytelling traditions of ancient communities, in the richness of the spirit world ... An impressive first novel by an important literary voice."
—Angel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
"Crooked Plow brings to vivid light the harsh realities of tenant farmers exploited by land owners who enrich themselves on the backs of the workers and yet still take much of what little the farmers save for themselves. The novel resonates with the "sounds of animals, of rustling leaves, of flowing water… the sound[s] of the world" - an illuminating journey in a dark time."
—K. M. Sandrick, The Historical Novel Society
"Vieira brings both sisters to electric life, but Belonísia's narration is especially immediate and moving. It would be a privilege to share a tongue with her."
—Lily Meyer, NPR
"Crooked Plow is a powerful and piercing book that follows the lives of two sisters, their family, and a disembodied spirit in the hinterlands of Bahia, Brazil. The sisters, who use the same voice after an accident takes the ability to speak away from one of them, grow and follow their own life paths confronting poverty, racial injustice, and the threat of being removed from the land they are profoundly attached to."
—David Martinez, Full Stop
"Subtle and profound ... Crooked Plow balances a portrait of inner lives with a thoughtful treatment of grand sociohistorical forces"
—Franklin Nelson, Times Literary Supplement
"Crooked Plow is a tour-de-force that deeply humanizes those who bear the unspeakable burdens of colonialism in the Americas, making their gestures appear through writing that pays close attention to hidden languages of care."
—Ana Laura Malmaceda, Words Without Borders
"Vieira Junior emphasizes that legacy and history are not always a curse. Rather, their persistence is a form of resistance to the dehumanization wrought upon the family by slavery's shadow...The book's success in Brazil exemplifies a trend in the country's literary landscape toward novels told from the perspective of the historically oppressed. In the past five years, Vieira Junior has been an integral member of a group of Brazilian writers who, in depicting racism and slavery through the viewpoint of racial minorities and enslaved peoples, remind us of Brazil's painful colonial history while returning agency to those who suffered under its one-sided narration."
—Jimin Kang, The Nation
"Translated into more than ten languages, Crooked Plow has received wide acclaim, both for its poignant story of social struggles and for the empathetic depiction of the quilombolas' lives and traditions. Also remarkable is its vivid imagery and the colorful vocabulary typical of Brazil's Northeast. These are aptly maintained in Johnny Lorenz's excellent translation, which employs various Portuguese words and expressions present in the original, thus avoiding unwieldy footnotes or glossaries while offering English-language readers a taste for the distinct language of the Brazilian sertão."
—Cristina Pinto-Bailey, World Literature Today
"Lorenz's English translation deserves credit for conveying the understated lyricism and concentrated power of Vieira Junior's storytelling ... Crooked Plow is highly readable fiction, a flowing and clear novel that wears its experimentalism lightly while exploring a long history of exploitation and resistance."
—Cate Farr, Oxonian Review
"Crooked Plow is a novel that shows us, through magic and murder, how the tongue can also be a fire in the greatest sense-one that can alter lives, spark movements and claim freedoms"
—Laura Garmeson, Asymptote Journal
"Beautifully translated by Johnny Lorenz ... a strong contender for this year's International Booker Prize and is one of my top picks to win the prestigious accolade."
—Leo Boix, Morning Star
"A rich, multi-voiced novel that does not shy away from portraying the present-day legacies of Brazil's colonial past"
—Rafael Mendes Silva, The Conversation
"Sweltering, colourful, loudly pronounced and spectacularly resourced."
—George Monaghan, New Statesman
"[Crooked Plow] is extraordinarily well written, offers a window into the interior lives of a class of people rarely considered outside of academic studies, and is suffused with tenderness and compassion for its characters and their plight. As I write this, I am immersed in Salvar o Fogo, and I can hardly wait for the finale of Vieira's trilogy. Crooked Plow is that good."
—Larry Rohter, The New York Review of Books
"Timeless ... [Crooked Plow] offers a unique window into a world where the legacy of resistance and the fight for land rights weave through the personal and collective narratives of its characters."
—Eleanor Wachtel, Five Books
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-05-09
The moving story of a family in rural Brazil.
This novel begins tightly focused on a family unit and gradually expands its scope to take on broader questions of race and class. Each of its three parts has a different narrator, with sisters Bibiana and Belonísia handling the first two. Bibiana is older by a year, and when the two are 7 and 6, curiosity leads them to taste the blade of a knife—at which point Belonísia winds up losing most of her tongue. From then on, Bibiana describes the sisters as “sharing the same tongue to make the words that revealed what we needed to become.” Eventually, Bibiana gets pregnant and leaves home; not long after, her sister becomes the focus of the narrative. Belonísia’s husband, Tobias, has a penchant for drunken behavior, which ends badly for him. “My mother’s happy marriage, or my sister’s—these seemed the exceptions,” Belonísia notes. Gradually, the challenges faced by the sisters’ family as they work as farmers come more into focus, leaving them at the mercy of the elements: “The drought had just ended, now we’d suffer the ruin of the flood.” The novel’s third section is narrated by a kind of bodiless saint, Santa Rita the Fisherwoman—which in practice amounts to mostly omniscient narration with a few choice asides: “My horse has died, so I cannot go forth mounted as I should, the way an encantada should present herself to human beings, the way she should reveal herself in this world.” The plantation where the sisters work changes hands, and Bibiana ponders taking on a leadership role in the community much like her late husband. Among the laudable feats Vieira Junior accomplishes in this novel is the way it gradually moves from a highly specific story to one with implications for a region's entire working class. In a book that often concerns itself with voices both singular and collective, it's a stirring progression.
This is a stirring, lived-in novel of struggles both personal and societal.
