Of Cattle and Men

February 15, 2023
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.

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May 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.