Of Cattle and Men

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.)