Out of Earth

by Sheyla Smanioto, Laura Garmeson (Translator), Sophie Lewis (Translator)

First translation into English of Desesterro, the multiple prize-winning novel by Sheyla Smanioto first published in Brazil, 2015

This remarkable Brazilian novel has been garlanded with multiple awards and accolades since its initial publication, as Desesterro: the prestigious SescPrize for Literature, the Machado de Assis award and the Jabuti award. The story follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertão. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is Half-Formed Thing.

Genres: Fiction, Brazil, Literary Fiction, Portuguese Literature, Literature, Contemporary

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 9, 2015

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheyla Smanioto's Desesterro was a groundbreaking book when it was published in 2015, a searing examination of violence and migration, a reckoning with Brazil's past and present. Out of Earth is the first English translation of Desesterro, the work of Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis, which was released this year by Boiler House Press. The story is centered on several generations of women, including a woman named Fátima, who escapes the sertão in the Northeast to the outskirts of São Paulo. The book is violent. We see the cruel death of an animal on the opening pages, with violence against women throughout. Characters are quite pointedly consumed. The narrative is fragmented, reflecting in part Smanioto's deconstruction of a linear story of migration. Smanioto is a powerful voice whose work sits within Brazil's literatura marginal movement, probing the wounds of the country's violent past. I didn't always vibe with the prose and I suspect the translation may prioritize a word-for-word fidelity to the original more than other translators might have done. Other readers may value that more than I do. My admiration of this book is at the conceptual, political, and narrative level, notwithstanding aspects of the prose that didn't work for me.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024, UK & Ireland

Tonho ran outside, leaving Fátima dead on the kitchen floor. The girl listens to the silence, waits to make sure, and only then comes out from under the sink. The rain at the door is bringing the earth from outside in the wind, goddamnit, the earth wants to take Fátima’s body away. Fátima’s face, topside, silverside, a whole landmass, multitude, memory. Fátima dead, bone, broth, blood, tendons. Fátima’s imagination in there, inside those extraordinary eye balls, Fátima’s imagination right there with the girl, its lustre gleaming among the pieces of meat. Fátima’s succulent imagination.

Out of Earth is a translation by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis of the 2015 novel Desesterro by Brazilian author Sheyla Smanioto, and published by Boiler House Press:

Boiler House Press is a new publisher of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and everything in-between.

We are based at the University of East Anglia, home of the world-renowned Creative Writing MA, and a burgeoning world centre for creative-critical writing studies.

We are passionate about writing that breaks a mould; that surprises; that plays with-and-between the creative and the critical. We want to open and excite your mind.

We understand the word publishing in its broadest sense; that a book is, in essence, a packaged idea; that publishing is a process through which ideas reach people and change happens.

And we believe that publishing can and should help provide a better deal for writers.

This is a powerful visceral novel centred around five women from four generations: that two are half-sisters one of whom is given no name at birth and later assumes her sister’s identity, and even to an extent her body, after her death of the sister at the hands of her husband, speaks to the hallucinatory, fatalistic nature of the text.

The novel is told in brief, non-linear and hypnotically-circular prose with the chapters broken up by entries from a dictionary of key concepts:

Circus: everything that is monstrous on show.

Monster: everything I cannot even imagine.

And the strong, disturbing, thread that runs through the story is that of misogynistic violence, and its recurrent impact in the lives of its victims:

Tonho has beaten Fátima so many times it’s not the end of the world, no wife ever died at her husband’s hands, bar the odd dead one who did. Look, barely any bruises. Maria de Fátima will bury her terror in the earth, the blows beneath her skin. She won’t take this, the beatings, the desire to beat her husband, she won’t carry this, the desire to make flour pulverising Tonho with a rock, she won’t take the candles with her to São Paulo to calm her spirit, let alone her prayers

But since she had the child in her arms newborn, since the child appeared on earth, Fátima has had this fear of what she may have learned quietly absorbing in her stomach.

Impressive.

[2TReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was intense

[Lucas Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um dos melhores romances da literatura brasileira contemporânea que li até o momento.

Essa obra é grandiosa por diversas questões: a narrativa fragmentada no espaço-tempo que nos leva a refletir tanto o passado quando o presente da realidade brasileira; as personagens construídas de maneira complexa como que um mosaico representando o que é ser mulher para muitas nordestinas; o estilo poético da prosa que torna a leitura quase que uma canção sendo declamada interiormente.

Achei a obra bastante sofisticada, por isso podendo ser às vezes difícil.

Profundamente tocante pela temática e também pelas brincadeiras que Sheyla faz com a linguagem. Super recomendo essa leitura para pessoas que gostam de narrativas fragmentadas, que brincam com o tempo e o espaço e também para aqueles que tem interesse no que há de novo na literatura brasileira.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boiler House Press are on a roll at the moment. I must have read about ten of their books in the last year, and all have been incredible. This one is no different.

[endrju · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to say about this novel that I'm left speechless. One could start with the all-pervasive violence against women, against animals, against environment. One could start with erasure of boundaries between humans, animals and other beings. One could start with femicide, cannibalism, necrophilia. Because "reading: devouring the hunger of others", as Smanioto writes. Companion book: Cannibal Metaphysics.

[Norberto Alves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um contemporâneo (que pode não ser) como nenhum outro. Sem marcação temporal, pode ser de qualquer época, mas traz o cenário nordestino, aborda a fome, a força da mulher e o "ser mulher" dividindo uma presença masculina opressora. Ainda não sei falar muito sobre esse livro, mas a narrativa de Sheyla brinca com as palavras e desconcerta o leitor, como no meu caso: achei que não estava entendendo. Tem ritmo e tem conteúdo, um toque de terror e realidade. E muita coisa que eu acho que não consegui pegar. Deve ter sido a experiência mais diferente que já tive com literatura nacional - e qualquer outra, se bobear.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book filled with brutality. unreal and simultaneously so understandable and concrete in what its saying. dehumanised, animalistic and hungry characters brought to life in a way i havent experienced in a while; the influence of one thousand years of solitude shines through in terms of sharp characterisation. the writing style really works, it flows well, making our return to events of phrases less inisitent but still powerful. all instances of repetition in the book feel this way. the repetition of familial trauma, of abuse against daughters, of patriarchal religion, and most importantly of the violence all those things entail. still, the book does not pretened all these things are inevatable. there are things on the horizon, a different world from the books entrapping town, even if only one character can see it, it exists.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Firstly, I’m really glad I read this work of translated fiction! It’s an overall bleak read, but the story is an important and unfortunately truthful one.

The writing style takes the reader on a journey much like that of the character’s lives: repetitive, slow and anguishing prose in the hot and dust-covered climate of the Brazilian sertão, interspersed with acts of harrowing violence.

I found the text challenging and confusing; at times I didn’t know what parts were actually happening in the story or even which characters were dead or alive. There were multiple story elements that I couldn’t follow. At the same time, I truly think the author intentionally styled the book in this way to bring the reader into the reality of the character’s lives.

[Filliphi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desesterro é um livro pra ser lido com o corpo inteiro e ir aguentando os socos, as sensações. Parece ter sido escrito em um outro idioma que a gente nem sabe que conhece até que desperta na gente. As personagens de Desesterro, apesar de fragilizadas, são extremamente firmes. A história é belíssima. É um livro às vezes caótico demais, que eu gostaria que fosse menos nebuloso em alguns momentos, mas a impressão é que em cada pequeno capítulo a Sheyla explora até o âmago as possibilidades das palavras e as analogias. Parece ter sido tudo considerado minuciosamente. É só lendo pra saber.

[Liviu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started to read this novel because of its inclusion on the shortlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024. At the end of the reading I have mixed feelings regarding the book. While it deals with some heavy subjects, such as the violence manifested on women across more generations, that could give substance to the plot, I have to say that the style diminished for me the impact the story could have had in the end. Indeed, there is suffering, there is violence, there is a run-away-to-the-big-city-to-escape-from-all-that-thing-that-drags-you-down, there are metaphors, dogs and vultures. But all of them are scattered through the short paragraphs, are spread all over the book in a non-linear writing that mixed action with random dialogues with various characters. It is mostly a good try to write a story with some style experimentation about the violence upon women and the consequences it carries upon future generations, but unfortunately it didn't touch me much. Sorry. The plus is that it is quite easy to read, it has a good rhythm (big plus) and the reading is catchy, so it doesn't require much effort. I would recommend it nevertheless to anyone interested in such themes, books about women or in the Brazilian literature in general.

[Jana Bianchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma leitura diferente e fora da minha zona de conforto — conheci a autora em uma mesa sobre literatura na Unicamp e fiquei fascinada com o jeito dela de falar sobre o livro. É praticamente poesia em prosa, e a história é forte e muito, muito incômoda (no bom sentido). Alguns capítulos são socos na cara! AMEI as imagens que a autora construiu, tem umas frases que são dignas de colocar num quadro (acabei não marcando nenhuma porque li na cama, antes de dormir, e preferia ficar totalmente absorta na experiência de leitura). As imagens são tão metafóricas que meu lado fantasioso enxerga um realismo mágico incrível, gostei mais ainda porque fui sem esperar esse aspecto. Não que eu seja uma grande manjadora das literaturas, mas do alto da minha experiência de leitura eu acho merecidíssimo o Prêmio SESC de 2015.

[Suellen Rubira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essa é uma história que se monta durante a leitura. A sinopse do livro é correta, mas quando cê tá lendo, a experiência se constrói por outras vias. Tudo está suspenso: o corpo escavado, essa história de mulheres - violentadas pelos homens e pela vida, violentas na linguagem.

Eu fiquei receosa se Sheyla conseguiria chegar até o final mantendo a coerência da escolha de palavras, da cadência da fábula e sim: ela entrega um romance sensacional. Uma linguagem localizada, que ñ deve nada para Guimarães Rosa, escritor aclamado na nossa literatura justamente pelo jogo da linguagem e dos ritmos que a acompanham.

Foi uma feliz descoberta!

[LindaJ^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Republic of Consciousness (UK) 2024 shortlist and apparently runner up to winner.

I read this months ago. I hated it BUT knew it was an ROC book. It was experimental, quite unique in structure and style. Why did I hate it? Way too violent and misogynist for my tastes. I suspect the author was writing this to reflect a reality that exists and I acknowledge it does. However, I'd prefer not to read about it. So my 3 stars is a balance between acknowledging how well the book was written and my dislike for what it portrayed.

Some of my GR friends have written excellent reviews of this book -- Gumble's Yard and Paul Fulcher to name two -- and I encourage you to read them.

[Kátia Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diferente de tudo que já li até hoje. Muito bonita a história, mas ao mesmo tempo muito triste. Uma realidade miserável.

[peg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book after seeing that it was longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, which rewards books published by small presses which are usually somewhat experimental. I should have guessed what a macabre tone this book would have after seeing the distinctive shape of vultures sitting in a bare tree on the cover!

It took two readings of the first 50 pages for me to grasp exactly who the characters were---three generations of women who were treated maliciously by the world, and one main male character. The setting was not fully described but it was easy to guess that it was a sordid, dirty and somewhat dystopian world.

In the next 100 pages the reader endures the mistreatment and murder of unhealthy dogs, a rape through the despicable male's point of view and a completely misogynous view of childbirth.

I would encourage you to read the GR reviews here by members of the Mookse and Gripes group, which I always wait til I have finished a book to read. These excellent readers were able to overcome the visceral reaction that I had and write about other aspects of the novel such as the fragmentary and circular nature of the writing and plot. I think we all agree that it is very innovative and different, though I for one would not miss it if it fails to make the ROC shortlist!

[Laura Lícia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mulher nenhuma morreu de apanhar do marido, exceto as que estão mortas".

"Tem tanto jeito de morrer como tem jeito de viver, Fatima. Ninguém nem sabe que está morto até ver que vivo é que não estava. Às vezes a morte vem de barriga grande, anunciada, outras vezes ela só já veio, é bom que você saiba".

Pegue o ritmo da leitura e deslize pela poesia de Sheyla Smanioto!

Pourran.... que livro!

Num cenário de pobreza e fome, temos principalmente tres fortes mulheres em Vilaboinha: Maria da Penha, Maria de Fátima, Maria menina (que nunca recebeu nome) que vão contando as histórias de suas vidas, de suas lutas, histórias de sobrevivência. De como lidam com Tonho, o homem-cão, o homem que mata cães, exceto os que vivem dentro dele.
É um livro pesado, cru, com uma narrativa diferente de tudo que você já leu...caoticamente poética.
É como diz a sinopse do livro: "carregado de dramaturgia, feito de torções gramaticais e desorganização temporal e espacial, Desesterro dá ao leitor a impressão de transitar entre realidade e sonho".

O livro foi vencedor do prêmio Sesc de literatura em 2015.

Leiam!!

[Mariana Costa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arrebatador, essa é a palavra que define o que “Desesterro” significou pra mim. Sheyla Smanioto traz à vida mulheres diferentes e muito parecidas, suas semelhanças esbarram na figura do homem opressor, o patriarcado que violenta corpos jovens e inocentes e que aponta isso como amor.

Um livro escrito em prosa poética, cheia de metáforas e reflexões sobre a pobreza, a fome, os sonhos, a força da mulher e muitos outros assuntos. É uma obra densa e, por muitas vezes, difícil, mas, ao mesmo tempo, é tão fascinante que a vontade de devorá-la de uma só vez torna-se quase insustentável.

Certamente, um dos melhores romances da literatura brasileira contemporânea.

[Zhou · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t quite enjoy this one, I think it was overly ambitious and wanted to do too many things at once:

1. Epic generational story
2. Feminism/misogyny/domestic violence
3. Non-linear narrative
4. Magical realism
5. Experimental writing style with chapters written in short paragraphs

On the whole too scattered and flimsy for me, felt like I was listening to a strong voice that was muted behind a wall of convolution…?

[Arnau Bertran Manyé]

First translation into the English language from Desesterro, by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis.

I read some comments about how bold they’ve been to translate this Portuguese novel into the English language so literally. But I must say I liked it. The use of the author, Sheyla Smanioto, in regards to the repetition of words and the effect the many “literally translated” adjectives had into the English idiom made this reading entertaining and adventurous. Besides, I got to enjoy a new way of learning about Brazil and the culture in the country.

However, leaving the use of words and language behind, this novel is the perfect example to use when depicting the struggles women have in rural Brazil: not only across two generations, but four. Then, Smanioto goes on telling us about how “Transformation: migration within”, and “Migrate to leave and yet remain” (page 201, ibid), translate into the courage of national migration paths of those who dream about living their life without domestic (gender-based) violence.

It is not an easy task, this one, to accomplish an understanding from the reader. We first need to notice how Sheyla dishevels the whole story without mercy: there is no proper beginning nor end, it simply starts; it simply ends. Together with the various ways the author has to introduce different characters and time periods. It is disheveled. Chaotic. For the reader? Highly unjust. But the same comparison can be made with gender violence: it takes no precedents, it just comes from the very decision of one person (commonly known as a “male” in our present binary-social status quo), and it may mark major unstable events and life circumstances for the victim. It simply happens.

And across her novel, Sheyla proves to master the courage to actually teach us a lesson: to transform is to change from one thing to another. Yet, you never forget where you came from. What you are made of. And it all remains in a cyclical path: we die, our bones go under the ground, until someday, the earth spits us out. We come back to the spots we once lived in. We come back being who we have always been: us, our cunning personality; mysterious and violent. Sometimes genuine. Very few times, selfless.

What else may I say without covering the central part of the novel’s uncharted theme: domestic gender violence, mixed with intergenerational trauma and poverty. Yes, the author scoops in dramatic, unpleasant, scenes that Maria goes on surviving. Together with the killing, barking dogs from the streets in the outdoors. Together with the many previous generations that have literally gone though that: violence. Mistreatment. Unrespectful atrocity. However, Smanioto says it sound and clear: “... forgetting is a crime without a corpse” (page 205).

Finally, in this rural-to-urban, seeking-a-better-life movement, from one girl, mother, grandmother, to another, we find the pure magic realism Smanioto so elegantly achieves: “Maria da Penha didn’t realise the rain was Fátima. Fátima raining down on all the earth, knocking on Penha’s door, but Penha didn’t recognise her granddaughter in this liquid form…” (page 257). She is right to mention she admired Márquez. I do believe she’s one of the many forerunners concerning this genre of fiction within our beloved, growing, contemporary, feminist literature time period.

[Rodrigo de Oliveira · Rating 3 out of 5]

O livro se parece com um monte de coisa canônica, tem Guimarães num encadear de palavras, tem Clarice na crueza. Tem, no fim, um cálculo muito claro (ranço dos Estudos Literários, talvez), uma autoconsciência que umas horas esbarra até na metalinguagem, que esfria minha relação com ele. A história das mulheres dessa família, sempre que pode, descamba para o pior destino possível dentro do miserabilismo, mas é a sabedoria, e não a perda de consciência, que me encanta nelas. E o livro parece precisar sufocar esta sabedoria dos personagens para aplicar a sua própria. Um dos casos em que a estrutura parece jogar contra, uma narrativa linear talvez tirasse do livro a obrigação de tantos interstícios (é recorrente capítulos terminarem com "mas isso vocês já sabem", ou "isso contamos mais adiante"). Penha e Maria de Fátima, quando falam, são de uma potência incrível. Ao mesmo tempo, há duas personagens mudas (uma delas muda até quase o final do livro), e o manancial de imagens que as duas projetam fica mais sugerido que descrito. Um livro errado, confuso, lindo e com passagens de fôlego puro, tudo ao mesmo tempo.

Um trecho memorável:

"- A Cátia não fugiu nem nada, vó, isso é história. Pra que é que ela ia fugir, voinha? Ela foi ajudar longe... tem a mãe e a irmã cuidadas. A Vera diz que não tem dinheiro pra modo de a gente ter pena dela, faz de sonsa. A Cátia não fugiu, voinha, ela manda tudo que ganha pra família. A Cátia é boa mulher, não é que nem essas outras que saem daqui fugidas, não é que nem tanta mulher que anda deixando pra trás Vilaboinha.
Dona Penha bufa, olha feio, diz nada. Seca a mão no pano, quase rasga. La vem a matraca, de novo essa ideia, desculpa esfarrapada. Gente boa tem coração na terra. Tem também gente que nasce com o diabo da estrada já no peito, guardada, tipo arredio, pelo menos volta. Bicho ruim que nem essa Cátia tem coração fora do peito e ainda sai dizendo, onde já se viu, ainda sai dizendo foi buscar, foi fazer o quê?, o coração pediu.
- A Senhora não sabe? Tem gente com gosto em nascer história - a Fátima não para de falar. - Mas Deus está vendo tudo...
- Para de dizer nome de Deus em vão, malcriada.
- Calma, voinha, é jeito de ir dizendo.
- Arruma jeito de ficar não dizendo, oxe, onde já se viu? E deixe que cuido de Maria. Tome seu café, vá, antes que esfrie tome seu café. E não fique com essas histórias, matraca, parece mesmo matraca essa língua solta, meu Deus. Presta atenção em sua filha, ela cresce e você nem vê porque foi cuidar dos outros, sonhar vida distante. Não vou estar aqui pra sempre, Fátima, então você toma jeito, ouça bem se lhe digo. Você é muito curta, não vem morrer logo, mas já devia saber. Nem toda terra é casa e nem todo homem é marido, acha que qualquer homem para de bater antes da mulher começar a rezar? Você fica vendo coisa bonita longe é porque não enxerga direito, lazarenta, toma jeito não pra você ver, Maria de Fátima."

(Editora Record/2018, p. 131/132)

[Taylan Harman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheyla Smanioto’s Out of Earth, translated from Portuguese by Sophie Lewis and Laura Garmeson and published by Boiler Press, is an eye-opening novel that faces Brazil’s past and present through the poignant examination of migration and violence.

The novel does not hesitate to probe violence with all its nakedness. Smanioto’s prose isn’t the most luxuriating, but it is well aligned with the themes and the fleeting attention span permeating the 21st century. With short and concise chapters, the novel mirrors the banal, swift nature of violence and death.

Pivoted on the lives of women from four generations, Out of Earth hands male characters a role in the outskirts of a proverbial city, where their voice and tone shape a woman’s existence.

Perhaps the most disturbing element within the story, which one can argue wasn’t noticed much by the Author herself, is the violence inflicted upon the female characters seems to be the only stabilising factor in their lives: The one totem in the absence of all that reminds them of their position in relation to power- in this case, the seamless power of men that streams from the heights of power and flows down below, where it then vaporises to consolidate social stratification perpetually. It is what they live with, what they must abscond from.

‘A hungry face is an ugly face, her grandma always used to say. You should be ashamed of telling me life is pointless, Maria de Fatima, you telling me when I put up with you every day and your devil-spawn sister, you’re telling me?’

Regrets set into older characters, who crystalise their guilt in hatred they inflict upon those who live as they once did. Women, having suffered the scorn inflicted by Maria de Fatima’s grandma from others in the oppressive prison constructed by the social world, can often be the scolding subject in the latter years. This presents women- and men, for that matter- with one brutal question: How does one maintain dignity, honesty and sympathy?

Out of Earth claims the realm punctuating all women: Here, the protagonist is not simply Maria or any other character named in the book. It is all of us.

A must-read!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize

Never had the sun loomed so low over Vila Marta as during the excavation, by the third day. All those people sifting through the earth for what Fátima didn't know and she knew it wasn't a fever: it was summer over in Vilaboinha.

The digging was unceasing. Fatima saw everything through the gaps in the slats, goddamn, the excavation never slept, and so much had already come out of the earth: summer, dry air, restless earth. And still these people won't stop cordoning everything off with yellow tape, my gosh, not to mention the dogs barking in her ears. Holy Mary Mother of God!

If Fátima could have buried the whole of Vilaboinha in the earth of Vila Marta, hell, she would have buried it. She let go. But with the fever and the summer in Vilaboinha came the memory of what her grandma used to say when Fátima was still very young: the earth eats up everything.

Even our hunger the earth eats, but the earth doesn't keep it all down inside, no ma'am. The earth doesn't like keeping secrets: it chews over all that's for forgetting and leaves the bones for later. Any secrets the earth will vomit up, leave our doorsteps blocked with bodies.

Hell, why this obsession with waking the earth where nothing will stay put? While in Vila Marta the earth
is settled and calm, in Vila Marta the earth is secret, guarded.

Why this obsession with waking earth that's so forgotten?

Out of Earth is a translation by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis of the 2015 novel “Desesterro” by Brazilian author Sheyla Smanioto, It is published by Boiler House Press – the UEA (University of East Anglia) based small press

As an aside I was delighted to see on the inner cover of this book (beautifully presented with French flaps) “Sophie’s translations have been shortlisted for …. The Republic of Consciousness Prize” as that shortlisting – for her translation by Les Fugitives of “Blue Self-Portrait” by Naomi Lefebvre – was in 2018 when I was a judge on the prize (one that Sophie Lewis herself judged two years later).

The book opens with a brief introduction by Kathleen McCaul Moura (who first featured an English translation of part of the book in an anthology and who bought the novel to the attention of the translators); and finishes with another essay by the Desmond Elliot Prize shortlisted author Tice Cin.

I would have been interested also to see a note by the two translators on the challenges they faced/decisions they took as the writing style of the novel seems unusual (intense but also perhaps slightly off) and I wondered how much of that was due to favouring a word for word translation and how much was a conscious reproduction of the style of the original.

It features (from the back cover) “four generations of female characters” (although I would argue more as other ancestral generations play a role at different times):

Once the girl, Fátima's sister, called her grandma Old Lady, thinking that's how names are made: the skinny dog's called Skin-and-Bones, she's a girl called girl, her mother who disappeared is called Aparecida, and Fátima must be very fátima, because nobody else is. Like Scarlett, that foreign word, even though deep down that isn't even the baby's name. She's also Maria, we're all Maria deep down. Maria da Penha, Maria Aparecida, Maria de Fátima, Maria the Girl and Baby Scarlett Maria.

Grandma Penha – who lives in the small, poverty-stricken viciously windswept neighbourhood of Vilaboinha

Maria Aparecida (“Cida”) her daughter, who died during the surprise birth of her second child during a solar eclipse. A surprise as no one had realised she was pregnant as she did not “show” – and the resulting child is nameless, largely silent - spending much of her time even when much older simply gazing out as something unknown in the distance, seen by Penha and others in the village as somehow cursed, but in fact something of a silent witness to the complicity of her family in violence.

(Maria de) Fatima - Cida’s oldest daughter / Penha’s granddaughter Fatima; perhaps the main character of the novel. Sometime after the birth of her own daughter (who again did not show) she left the North for Sao Paolo where she lives in a poor area – Villa Marta.

Scarlett – Fatima’s daughter: a main point of narrative development in the book is when she as a twenty-year-old unexpectedly visits her mother.

The only other key characters are Skinny – Penha’s dog and Tonho, a threatening and violent male, whose relationship with Fatima starts with a rape and ends with a violent near-assault after which he leaves her for dead (witnessed by her young daughter and her silent sister).

The book opens with a photographer visiting the family in Vilaboinha for a family portrait to commemorate Scarlet’s birth but sensing already the violence that is to come: “The photographer saw death in Fatima’s skin, it was hidden somewhere in her skin, encrypted, but it was death” - his own fate seeming equally doomed. And scene which plays through the book relates to an excavation in Villa Marta where some bodies are possibly recovered – seems to have similar echoes of the fate of some of the characters including those seemingly watching it.

The story itself is written in a rather fragmentary, circular way with a series of short sections whose physical and temporal location is not always clear (or I think singular) – with sections moving, sometimes fluidly other times abruptly, from Sao Paolo to the North and across various times in the lives of the four generations.

And even more so we start to realise that the characters themselves may have merged – with a seemingly dream like post beating scene when the unnamed sister metaphorically physically consumes the apparently dead body and identity of Fatima, becoming less obviously metaphorical and fantastical as the story progresses and as Scarlet and Fatima meet in Villa Marta.

The writing is often graphic and visceral and full of recurring imagery (for example titular imagery of burial and excavation), which at times is unpleasant (for example rape scenes) or just strange (for example a strange gorilla woman), sometimes dream like (with imagery of a goat and of a child born with two faces) and which is always saturated in desperate poverty, violence, blood, misogyny and hopelessness.

The overall cumulative effect is memorable and striking, with a dark almost repellent poetry to it - and as a result for all I am glad to have read it this is not a book I could either unambiguously recommend or could easily revisit.

Nevertheless an impressive feat of writing, translation and publication.

[Joshua Fundafunda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a challenge to read, both in the contents of its story and the way it's presented.

It reads like a dream, that is I felt I could never really find any secure footing throughout. Obviously that is an entirely intentional decision; the narrative flow, the multiple shifting - merging - perspectives, the literal page structure all aim to destabilise.

The story itself is often nightmarish, grotesque, and bizarre, but incredibly important. It was quite overwhelming. The harrowing descriptions of bodily and mental harm these women endure over their lives was shocking, and often force me to confront ugly realities I might otherwise avoid. I was particularly struck time and time again by the allusion of violence upon the Earth equating to violence upon the women in the narrative. It filled me with a strange unbridled fear I was not expecting at all.

Case and point that clicked for me: "she was watching the girl and her daughter, watching the pair of them and wondering what flesh the eye is made of, that hurts when beaten from afar". What an agonising moment, that displays exactly the generational isolation and trauma that patriarchal violence creates.

[Felipe Vieira · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eu não gostei de muita coisa desse livro. O tema muito me interessa, mas a forma como foi trabalhada não me apeteceu. Não curti a escrita do início do livro cheia de frases curtas e umas repetições desnecessárias. Ao meu ver atrapalha muito o andamento da leitura. Não curti a narração.

Nem mesmo os elementos fantásticos que vi na história fez diferença para mim. Vida que segue porque não é sempre que temos uma experiência boa. E tudo bem experiências literárias são diferentes para cada um.

[Katia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well that was absolutely revolting, gut-wrenching, brutal, horrifying... and completely brilliant.

I don't even know how to start. How can I write a chronological review when the book itself ignores the way time passes? We jump from future to past to present, from one perspective to the thoughts of another - in a horrifying game of pinball.

This is a Brazilian book, written in Portuguese and here translated into English by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis. It is centred around four generations of working-class women in a village in Brazil. Four generations of mistreated, abused, and beaten women, as we are thrown into a world of hate and brutality at the hands of misogyny and corruption. The book is a form of vicious poetry rather than an ordinary novel, in that the narrative is non-linear, torn apart, and told as if in a rush which matches the speed and overwhelming nature of the violence that we read.

It is a book about digging as I saw in another review by Jacqueline Schaalje. Throughout the book there is the constant mention of the digging and the construction work happening outside of the women's world. They dig up bones, then bodies, then pictures, but most importantly, they dig up secrets. It is a political reference to the burying of history that Brazil has seen time and time again.

God, I couldn't recommend this book to anyone - make sure you know what you're in for. It's disgusting. But it's brilliant because it is disgusting. Because we aren't told the kiddy version of what happens. Because everything gets dug up eventually. Good luck trying to bury this one.

[Diego · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Às vezes os olhos enganam a gente e fazem ver um homem entre os cachorros repartido, vai ver nem é mais homem, faz a festa dos cachorros de Vila Marta. Vai ver nem é mais homem, é só braço, é perna, é parte, vai ver não é mais homem, é só carne, é osso, não é mais homem, é sobra para os cachorros".

[Isobel Ely · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a lot. It was at times beautiful, but others harrowing and overwhelming. It danced around TWs using delicate nuances, that became so clear and morbid. The setting of Brazil was interesting, and it was a compelling ode to One Hundred Years of Solitude. The format was so distinct and I have not read anything like it.

[Hilary Ashton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t understand when it was a dream, when was “reality”. Unpleasant issues dealt with but not in a way that I immediately understood. Didn’t like the book, but had nothing else to read on the flight!

[Agnieszka · Rating 1 out of 5]

The style of this book didn't work for me. The short paragraphs, the repetitiveness, random dialogues. I think there was an important story there but I didn't enjoy having to work so hard to unearth it.