Of Cattle and Men

by Ana Paula Maia, Zoë Perry (Translator)

Overview

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.

In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913867492
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	04/11/2023
Pages:	99
Sales rank:	597,467
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ana Paula Maia (Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter and has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterráneas (2003), De gados e homens (2013), and the trilogy A saga dos brudos, comprising Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) and Carvão animal (2011). Her novel A guerra dos bastardos (2007) won praise in Germany as among the best foreign detective fiction. As a scriptwriter she has worked on a wide range of projects for television, cinema and theatre.The author won the São Paulo de Literatura Prize for Best Novel of the Year two years in a row: in 2018 for her novel Assim na Terra como embaixo da Terra, and in 2019 for Enterre Seus Mortos .

Zoë Perry is a Canadian-American translator who has translated work by several contemporary Portuguese-language authors, including Emilio Fraia, Clara Drummond, Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Lourenço Mutarelli, and Carol Bensimon. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Astra, n+1 and The Paris Review. Zoë was awarded a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Veronica Stigger’s Opisanie Swiata and was selected for a residency at the Banff International Translation Centre for her translation of Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol . Her translation of Ana Paula Maia's Of Cattle and Men won the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in 2023. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a translators collective.

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2023

Maia’s intense and provocative first novel to be translated into English follows the disquieting events at a remote slaughterhouse in rural Brazil. Edgar Wilson is the dutiful stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse, where he shows exceptional touch: he lulls the cows into a daze, then prays for them before knocking them out with a mallet. Edgar’s routine is disrupted when the foreman, Bronco Gil, suspects something is hunting the cows after one dies from smashing through a fence and running into a wall at full speed. Edgar, however, wonders if some other, more powerful force is responsible. While the matter-of-fact prose keeps the plot moving, it also has a hypnotic, darkly beautiful quality: “He reaches down and gently touches its fractured forehead, making the sign of the cross. He does not find his reflection in the cow’s eyes. This time, he was not there,” Maia writes of Edgar. But perhaps most impressive is how she constructs the novel’s brutal, uneasy atmosphere through authentic elements like a nearby river that’s “brimmed with blood” from slaughterhouse dumping and a life-or-death gambling game in which the workers dunk their heads underwater for as long as they can. This goes straight for the jugular. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"This short sharp shock of a book brings a surprise with every new page...a fresh and spirited report on how civilisation has done nothing to tame humanity’s worst instincts." —The Guardian

"Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir." —Kirkus

"Intense and provocative….This goes straight for the jugular." —Publishers Weekly

"In Perry’s visceral, understated translation…the narrative unfolds with the compulsiveness of a psychological thriller." —The Times Literary Supplement

"Maia’s stark style lends her novella a chilling, detached quality, allowing the violence and viscera to be all the more overwhelming." —Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

"Biblical in scale and language, Of Cattle and Men is a book to squirm beneath; to measure oneself against." —Southwest Review

"Of Cattle and Men is an excellent book of many dark, quiet questions." —World Literature Today

"Powerful." —EcoLit Books

From the Publisher

2023-01-25
In Brazilian author Maia’s second book to be translated into English, strange events upset work at a slaughterhouse.

At Touro do Milo Slaughterhouse, trucks deliver cows “tapdancing in their own faeces and urine,” and the nearby Rio das Moscas (River of Flies) is salty with animal blood. Outside the slaughterhouse people beg for rotten meat; inside, men live beside cattle. “Only the voices on one side and the mooing on the other distinguish the men from the ruminants.” Maia’s cast of characters includes no women. She focuses on Edgar Wilson, the stun operator who marks cows with the sign of the cross before hitting them with a mallet. “He believes these animals have a soul” and admits he’s a murderer: “He knows his own violence will never allow him to see the face of his Creator.” The foreman is Bronco Gil, a “self-proclaimed hunter” who lost an eye to a vulture. There’s Helmuth, the splitter, who chain-saws cows in half. The nicest guy, Santiago, sips mushroom tea and likes electric eels. Perry adroitly translates the world of dust and blood Maia has assembled. There are no rants against the meat industry—Maia lets the facts condemn it. The pacing is quick, with threads of grim poetry: “The hue of the twilight sky resembles that of a pomegranate cut in half.” Tensions rise when cows start to miscarry, graze for food west instead of north, slam themselves into walls, and drown. The men hunt for a possible predator or cattle rustlers to no avail. The cows suddenly choose death en masse rather than be slaughtered. When asked how this could happen, Edgar surmises it’s “one abyss calling out to another abyss.”

Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir.

Kirkus Reviews