They're Cows, We're Pigs

by Carmen Boullosa, Leland H. Chambers (Translator)

Overview

A dark, thought-provoking adventure that “artfully evokes the blood-soaked reality of 17th-century pirates” (Entertainment Weekly).

This “wryly humorous, satiric, and often macabre novel” (Library Journal) follows Jean Smeeks, a Flemish thirteen-year-old who signs up as an indentured servant with the French West Indies Company, but instead winds up a slave on the notorious island of Tortuga. Over time, he learns the arts of herbal medicine and surgery—a skill that allows him to join a band of Caribbean pirates. Contrasting Jean’s romantic pull toward the “Brethren of the Coast”—an all-male society pursuing socialist, anti-colonialist ideals—with the brutal reality of their lawless existence, They’re Cows, We’re Pigs is a “unique and memorable” novel whose “pirate world leaves you as a good book should: thinking” (The Boston Herald).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555846039
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Carmen Boullosa is a Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context.

Editorial Reviews

"We are cattle but you are pigs!" This defiant declaration is the heart of the conflict in the American debut of a highly regarded Mexican writer. In a freewheeling but finely tuned work that makes use of magic realism, Boullosa describes the ordeal of a native people conquered and preyed upon by the Spanish, here not soldiers but buccaneers. A bildungsroman of sorts, this fictional chronicle uses real locations (Tortuga Island), and people (Alexander O. Exquemeling) to render Caribbean piracy in the second half of the 17th century. The primary narrator, Jean Smeeks, is a European lad who is kidnapped in Flanders, put on a ship bound for Tortuga Island and sold into slavery. After learning medicine from a native healer and a French surgeon, Smeeks signs on to be a medical officer in a marauding brotherhood of pirates, or "pigs." As the story unfolds, the reader is treated to a running commentary on the difference between the "pigs"who envision their life as democratic, free of women and of national and religious prejudiceand the land-locked, law-abiding "cattle," bound by traditional values. The squeamish should be advised that references to pig and cow viscera spill across these deftly written pages. The narrative is fractured into many different voices and stories, but this format appropriately reflects the restless, roaming pirate life, and all the strands knit together in a well-crafted closure. Regarded as one of the most dazzling of Latin America's new generation, Boullosa justifies her laurels in this rich work. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1666, 13-year-old Jean Smeeks of Flanders sells himself as an indentured servant to the French West Indies Company and soon finds himself a slave on the island of Tortuga in the Caribbean. Fortunately, here he is befriended first by le Ngre Miel, an African slave, who instructs him in herbal medicine, and then by Pineau, the French Huguenot surgeon, from whom he learns "modern" medicine. Thus equipped, he signs on as a surgeon for a fleet of pirate ships and becomes a pirate himself. Smeeks, the narrator, presents a mock-heroic tale in which the utopian ideals of a just and honorable pirate society are blandly countered by vivid, anatomically detailed descriptions of torture, rape, and pillage. Mexican writer Boullosa is the author of ten novels and novellas as well as numerous volumes of poetry, plays, and essays. This wryly humorous, satiric, and often macabre novel, the first of Boullosa's works to appear in English translation, will please sophisticated readers.Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.

Library Journal