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Saga of Brutes
Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly comic “Between Dog Fights and Hog Slaughter,” “The Dirty Work of Others,” and “ carbo animalis ,” published in one volume for the first time. Ana Paula Maia’s no-holds barred narrative pulls few punches, describing a shocking reality of the lives of the invisible workingmen who, like Atlas, are forced to carry society’s burdens. These heroes of vile circumstance―coal miners, firemen, garbage collectors, crematorium workers―are the soot-covered supermen who risk their lives performing difficult and dangerous work for others. But in the end, they, too, amount to nothing but carbo animalis―notwithstanding the impure relation of coal to diamonds. Despite their straightforwardness, Ana Paula Maia’s stories are filled with great insight and compassion for the lives of the men who live on the edge of a society built with their own sweat.
- GenresFiction
204 pages, Paperback
Published November 9, 2016
6 people are currently reading
151 people want to read
About the author
Ana Paula Maia
25 books256 followersAna Paula Maia (Nova Iguaçu, 1977) is a Brazilian writer, scriptwriter and musician.
During her adolescence she player at a punk rock band and studied piano. As a scriptwriter she took part in the script of the short film O entregador de pizza (2001), and along with Mauro Santa Cecilia and Ricardo Petraglia, she wrote the theatrical monologue O rei dos escombros assembled in 2003 by the Moacyr Chaves firm. She published her first novel under the title O habitante das falhas subterrâneas in 2003.
She is the author of the trilogy A saga dos brutos, started by the short novel Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos y O trabalho sujo dos outros —published in one volume— and concluded by the novel Carvão animal.
Influenced by Dostoievski, by Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone in her cinematography, and the pulp literature and series, her works are maked by the violence and the treatment of their characters, that often includes scatological elements.
During her adolescence she player at a punk rock band and studied piano. As a scriptwriter she took part in the script of the short film O entregador de pizza (2001), and along with Mauro Santa Cecilia and Ricardo Petraglia, she wrote the theatrical monologue O rei dos escombros assembled in 2003 by the Moacyr Chaves firm. She published her first novel under the title O habitante das falhas subterrâneas in 2003.
She is the author of the trilogy A saga dos brutos, started by the short novel Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos y O trabalho sujo dos outros —published in one volume— and concluded by the novel Carvão animal.
Influenced by Dostoievski, by Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone in her cinematography, and the pulp literature and series, her works are maked by the violence and the treatment of their characters, that often includes scatological elements.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 9, 2025
Erasmo Wagner waits for the cistern to drain while he smokes a cigarette. He goes through the gate, and observes Tonhão, loose, on the other side of the street, grazing in an empty lot with some chickens. The pig dealer comes toward him and asks for a smoke. He gives him one. Edgar Wilson reaches for a box of matches in his pants pocket. The two stand quietly for two minutes, surrounded by light smoke.
"Do you like working with pigs?" Erasmo Wagner asks.
"They're good animals. They get used to us," responds Edgar Wilson.
The woman reappears and signals for Edgar Wilson to come speak with her. He says thanks for the cigarette, pays the woman, takes his three pigs, and goes away.
Saga of Brutes (2016) is a trilogy of novellas ('Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter', 'The Dirty Work of Others' and 'carbo anamalis') translated by Alexandra Joy Forman from works by Ana Paula Maia: 'Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos' and 'O trabalho sujo dos outros', published together in 2011 and 'Carvão animal', originally published in 2011.
My ratings for the three:
'Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter' 2.5 stars rounded to 3
'The Dirty Work of Others' 4 stars
'carbo anamalis' 3.5 stars, rounded to 4
I've given 4 stars here for 'The Dirty Work of Others' and attached my ratings for the other novellas to the respective Goodreads entries.
I first came across the author via the brilliant Of Cattle and Men (2023), Zoe Perry's translation of De Gados e Homens (2013), which won the author, translator and press the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Cercador Prize.
That novel - as do all three of the trilogy here - featured the recurrent character in the author's work Edgar Wilson, who first appeared in passing in A Guerra dos Bastardos (2007) and who also features in the author's more recent 'trilogy of the end' Enterrem Seus Mortos (2017), De Cada Quinhentos Uma Alma (2021) and Búfalos selvagens (2024) [all as yet untranslated into English].
Wilson, a slaughterhouse worked, is as the author has explained, usually a character who kills where it necessary for the dynamic of the story, but is not a hired killer. ("Tem um personagem que é recorrente nos meus livros, o Edgar Wilson, e ele é um que mata, que é necessário dentro daquela dinâmica da história, mas não chega a ser um matador de aluguel.")
The first story here Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter is, like Of Cattle and Men, focused on Egar Wilson. This, chronologically, is actually set after the later novel, Wilson now working, as he had wished while stunning cattle in Of Cattle and Men, with pigs, animals he respects even as he dispatches. Although it's hardly an easy life:
No one speaks. The flies buzz around their heads. Large, disgusting flies. Edgar Wilson takes the cigarette pack out of his pocket. His last cigarette is on the ground, extinguished in the policeman's sweat. He crumples the pack and throws it over his left shoulder. On sunny days like these, with stagnant air, smelling of sewage, and tripe stuck deep up his nose, he sometimes feels it will never end. He feels condemned to this place, to this situation. The stench and heat restrict his movements and complicate his thinking. All he can do is wait for nighttime's more tolerable temperature and occasional breeze.
This however felt much the weakest of the three novellas. The deeply religious (if, in his view, beyond salvation) Edgar of Of Cattle and Men, here appears to have much less depth, and instead rather more violence, casually putting a co-worker in the meat grinder who he suspects of having an affair with his beloved, and later killing her as well.
'The Dirty Work of Others' was, for me, a much stronger work.
The protagonist Erasmo Wagner is a refuse collector, having spent some time in prison for killing a local rich man Old Mendes, who had abused Erasmo's younger brother and, then when they threatened to report him to the police, murdered Erasmo's parents .
But compared to Edgar, particularly the Edgar of the novella here, Erasmo is much less violent - he can't even bring himself to kill a goat Tonhão he acquires and who causes chaos - and rather more philosophical in his thoughts.
They sit, taciturn. A dry and heavy silence. Erasmo Wagner spies Tonhão. The goat's peacefully chewing pages from the newspaper. He still doesn't understand how it got into the van, and he feels a strange burden.
Erasmo Wagner knows this goat belongs to him, and carries him within, too. The way the goat confronts Erasmo Wagner makes him want to confess his sins. To redeem himself. A man like him feels redeemed by the suffering he's been through, the time he's done. But there are deeper layers of the soul, unreachable by human punishment or terrestrial disgrace.
There's something in Erasmo Wagner that impels him to collect trash without questioning. It makes him want to disappear without a trace. He's never confessed, though he's devoted to some Catholic saints. At times, he feels the body is the soul's prison, even when he's out walking alone on the street. Ever since he saw Old Mendes's eyes in the goat's eyes, he's needed to confess. Tonhão is there to expiate Erasmo Wagner's sins, but he doesn't.
This book is set at the same time as 'Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter' and indeed, as the quote that opens my review suggests, Erasmo Wagner and Edgar Wilson meet at a woman's house where the former is there, during a refuse truck drivers' strike, to help his cousin Edivardes to clean out the cistern and cesspool, and the latter to pick up three pigs. And later Erasmo and Edivardes drive past Edgar who himself has stopped at the scene of a car accident (the same scene also appearing in the first novella).
The final story, 'carbo anamalis', is set chronologically before both of the first two. It is focused on two figures Ernesto Wesley (another of the author's EW figures), a firefighter:
"Sometimes all one can do is pray," says Ernesto Wesley.
"How did you know there were bodies in that room?" asks another fireman.
Ernesto Wesley takes a deep breath. He's tired, the orbits of his eyes are red and his hoarse voice doesn't seem to belong to him.
"Having worked at this for a while, I can smell a burned body kilometers away," responds Ernesto.
"That's true," says another fireman who's been quiet so far. "Ernesto can tell who each dirty sock in the firehouse belongs to by its odor. He's got the best nose I know." The man laughs.
"Is it why you decided to be a firefighter?"
Ernesto Wesley sighs and rubs his eyes. He's very tired.
"No. I became a firefighter because I had the courage to go where no one else would," responds Ernesto Wesley.
The men, dumbstruck, reflect momentarily before nodding.
and his brother Ronivon, who works at a crematorium.
The planet is finite and transitory. As the space to store trash dwindles, so too does the space to inhume bodies. Some decades or centuries from now there'll be more bodies beneath the earth than on it. We'll be stepping on our ancestors, neighbors, relatives, and enemies, like we step on dry grass: without even noticing it. Ground soil and water will be contaminated with leachate, liquid containing toxic substances that drains from bodies in decomposition. Death has the power to generate death. And it spreads, even if mostly unperceived.
In spite of a certain melancholy that comes over him when he thinks of the incinerated, Ronivon knows that asepsis is best achieved by setting mortal remains on fire. Otherwise to think of the end of the world is to think of mountains of dross and the earth soaked through with the inhumed.
The two brothers also farm worms.
During the novella - which is more plot driven than the other books - we encounter both Erasmo Wagner (who is in prison with the third brother Vladmilson, and revenges his killing) and a younger Edgar Wilson, a miner before he became a slaughterman:
Men plunge into viscid gloom beneath graves, inhaling coal dust, obscured from the light of day. Accidents in the mines are common and many are buried alive. Not everyone has the intrepidness to work the coalfields. When they realize the pit depths, the total privation of sunlight, and high risk of premature burial, they desist. To reach these depths of darkness one must be courageous and willing to go where no one wants to.
But there'll always be some hero with the heart to go anywhere. Edgar Wilson, at twenty-three, is one of the youngest apprentices in a colliery employing 113 men. He's hacked and shoveled coal since he was twenty, without vacation, with only two days "off" a year.
It makes for a fascinating insight into the three men who each go where others won't and perhaps, thereby, put themselves, at least in their eyes, beyond redemption.
"Do you like working with pigs?" Erasmo Wagner asks.
"They're good animals. They get used to us," responds Edgar Wilson.
The woman reappears and signals for Edgar Wilson to come speak with her. He says thanks for the cigarette, pays the woman, takes his three pigs, and goes away.
Saga of Brutes (2016) is a trilogy of novellas ('Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter', 'The Dirty Work of Others' and 'carbo anamalis') translated by Alexandra Joy Forman from works by Ana Paula Maia: 'Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos' and 'O trabalho sujo dos outros', published together in 2011 and 'Carvão animal', originally published in 2011.
My ratings for the three:
'Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter' 2.5 stars rounded to 3
'The Dirty Work of Others' 4 stars
'carbo anamalis' 3.5 stars, rounded to 4
I've given 4 stars here for 'The Dirty Work of Others' and attached my ratings for the other novellas to the respective Goodreads entries.
I first came across the author via the brilliant Of Cattle and Men (2023), Zoe Perry's translation of De Gados e Homens (2013), which won the author, translator and press the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Cercador Prize.
That novel - as do all three of the trilogy here - featured the recurrent character in the author's work Edgar Wilson, who first appeared in passing in A Guerra dos Bastardos (2007) and who also features in the author's more recent 'trilogy of the end' Enterrem Seus Mortos (2017), De Cada Quinhentos Uma Alma (2021) and Búfalos selvagens (2024) [all as yet untranslated into English].
Wilson, a slaughterhouse worked, is as the author has explained, usually a character who kills where it necessary for the dynamic of the story, but is not a hired killer. ("Tem um personagem que é recorrente nos meus livros, o Edgar Wilson, e ele é um que mata, que é necessário dentro daquela dinâmica da história, mas não chega a ser um matador de aluguel.")
The first story here Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter is, like Of Cattle and Men, focused on Egar Wilson. This, chronologically, is actually set after the later novel, Wilson now working, as he had wished while stunning cattle in Of Cattle and Men, with pigs, animals he respects even as he dispatches. Although it's hardly an easy life:
No one speaks. The flies buzz around their heads. Large, disgusting flies. Edgar Wilson takes the cigarette pack out of his pocket. His last cigarette is on the ground, extinguished in the policeman's sweat. He crumples the pack and throws it over his left shoulder. On sunny days like these, with stagnant air, smelling of sewage, and tripe stuck deep up his nose, he sometimes feels it will never end. He feels condemned to this place, to this situation. The stench and heat restrict his movements and complicate his thinking. All he can do is wait for nighttime's more tolerable temperature and occasional breeze.
This however felt much the weakest of the three novellas. The deeply religious (if, in his view, beyond salvation) Edgar of Of Cattle and Men, here appears to have much less depth, and instead rather more violence, casually putting a co-worker in the meat grinder who he suspects of having an affair with his beloved, and later killing her as well.
'The Dirty Work of Others' was, for me, a much stronger work.
The protagonist Erasmo Wagner is a refuse collector, having spent some time in prison for killing a local rich man Old Mendes, who had abused Erasmo's younger brother and, then when they threatened to report him to the police, murdered Erasmo's parents .
But compared to Edgar, particularly the Edgar of the novella here, Erasmo is much less violent - he can't even bring himself to kill a goat Tonhão he acquires and who causes chaos - and rather more philosophical in his thoughts.
They sit, taciturn. A dry and heavy silence. Erasmo Wagner spies Tonhão. The goat's peacefully chewing pages from the newspaper. He still doesn't understand how it got into the van, and he feels a strange burden.
Erasmo Wagner knows this goat belongs to him, and carries him within, too. The way the goat confronts Erasmo Wagner makes him want to confess his sins. To redeem himself. A man like him feels redeemed by the suffering he's been through, the time he's done. But there are deeper layers of the soul, unreachable by human punishment or terrestrial disgrace.
There's something in Erasmo Wagner that impels him to collect trash without questioning. It makes him want to disappear without a trace. He's never confessed, though he's devoted to some Catholic saints. At times, he feels the body is the soul's prison, even when he's out walking alone on the street. Ever since he saw Old Mendes's eyes in the goat's eyes, he's needed to confess. Tonhão is there to expiate Erasmo Wagner's sins, but he doesn't.
This book is set at the same time as 'Between Dogfights and Hog Slaughter' and indeed, as the quote that opens my review suggests, Erasmo Wagner and Edgar Wilson meet at a woman's house where the former is there, during a refuse truck drivers' strike, to help his cousin Edivardes to clean out the cistern and cesspool, and the latter to pick up three pigs. And later Erasmo and Edivardes drive past Edgar who himself has stopped at the scene of a car accident (the same scene also appearing in the first novella).
The final story, 'carbo anamalis', is set chronologically before both of the first two. It is focused on two figures Ernesto Wesley (another of the author's EW figures), a firefighter:
"Sometimes all one can do is pray," says Ernesto Wesley.
"How did you know there were bodies in that room?" asks another fireman.
Ernesto Wesley takes a deep breath. He's tired, the orbits of his eyes are red and his hoarse voice doesn't seem to belong to him.
"Having worked at this for a while, I can smell a burned body kilometers away," responds Ernesto.
"That's true," says another fireman who's been quiet so far. "Ernesto can tell who each dirty sock in the firehouse belongs to by its odor. He's got the best nose I know." The man laughs.
"Is it why you decided to be a firefighter?"
Ernesto Wesley sighs and rubs his eyes. He's very tired.
"No. I became a firefighter because I had the courage to go where no one else would," responds Ernesto Wesley.
The men, dumbstruck, reflect momentarily before nodding.
and his brother Ronivon, who works at a crematorium.
The planet is finite and transitory. As the space to store trash dwindles, so too does the space to inhume bodies. Some decades or centuries from now there'll be more bodies beneath the earth than on it. We'll be stepping on our ancestors, neighbors, relatives, and enemies, like we step on dry grass: without even noticing it. Ground soil and water will be contaminated with leachate, liquid containing toxic substances that drains from bodies in decomposition. Death has the power to generate death. And it spreads, even if mostly unperceived.
In spite of a certain melancholy that comes over him when he thinks of the incinerated, Ronivon knows that asepsis is best achieved by setting mortal remains on fire. Otherwise to think of the end of the world is to think of mountains of dross and the earth soaked through with the inhumed.
The two brothers also farm worms.
During the novella - which is more plot driven than the other books - we encounter both Erasmo Wagner (who is in prison with the third brother Vladmilson, and revenges his killing) and a younger Edgar Wilson, a miner before he became a slaughterman:
Men plunge into viscid gloom beneath graves, inhaling coal dust, obscured from the light of day. Accidents in the mines are common and many are buried alive. Not everyone has the intrepidness to work the coalfields. When they realize the pit depths, the total privation of sunlight, and high risk of premature burial, they desist. To reach these depths of darkness one must be courageous and willing to go where no one wants to.
But there'll always be some hero with the heart to go anywhere. Edgar Wilson, at twenty-three, is one of the youngest apprentices in a colliery employing 113 men. He's hacked and shoveled coal since he was twenty, without vacation, with only two days "off" a year.
It makes for a fascinating insight into the three men who each go where others won't and perhaps, thereby, put themselves, at least in their eyes, beyond redemption.
April 28, 2024
Video review https://youtu.be/CrU3no080lg
November 30, 2016
A harsh look at the disposable people disposing of our disposable things (garbage, animals, human organs, teeth, fingers, children, the dead, grease, family, memories).
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March 28, 2017This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
November 6, 2025
Another stunning work about brutal lives in brutal conditions, this based around a crematorium and a firefighter. Enough can't be said about how good and visceral her writing is. Brilliant writer.
August 15, 2022
A very good book
December 14, 2023
He doesn't consider the wretched landfill scavengers, who could also benefit from the better trash. He just doesn't care.
Just as those above him don't care. In the diminishing scale from starving to degenerate, he occupies a place just above miserable.
Missing it just by a hair, same as being grazed by a bullet.
Erasmo Wagner picks up more than twenty tons of garbage on his daily route. Measures the wealth of a society by the amount of trash it produces. And his is a fairly short route, so he thinks about how much money goes into what ends up being thrown out. Everything transforms into trash; even he himself is trash to the many people, rats, and vultures that constantly peck at him.
The Brazilian Ana Paula Maia is a city-suburb dwelling, female author but her clear preference in writing is for county-based, male, working class characters. In particular she writes about those working in professions on the edge of society, doing jobs necessary to middle and upper class living but ones which are not just hidden from that society, but the brutal reality of which is deliberately and willfully not contemplated, what the back cover of the Dalkey Archive edition (in poetic language which I am not clear if is translated) calls them “heroes of vile circumstance ……… forced to carry society’s burdens”.
The effect is something like a Brazilian and brutalist, sometimes biblical version of Magnus Mills.
Translated by Alexandra Joy Forman (possibly a little unevenly – as some passages did not seem to read entirely logically) this novella was published in “Saga of Brutes” was published by Dalkey Archives in 2016 as a collection of three strongly linked novellas.
In Brazil Sago des Brutos #1 (Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos) and #2 (O trabalho sujo des outros) were originally published together in 2009; with #3 (carvão animal) following in 2011.
My reviews of the first and third of these are here
Between Dog Fights and Hog Slaughter
carbo animalis
Maia’s writing features as a recurring character Edgar Wilson (apparently based after one of her inspirations Edgar Allan Poe’s and his story “William Wilson”) – but all her books appear to feature similar everyman type characters with initials EW (which may as well serve as “ewww” given much of the material covered – although these books are designed to get a much more visceral reaction than that).
Here / in the second novella - “The Dirty Works of Others” we have Erasmo Wagner – working as a trash collector (from the novella’s last sentence – “he’ll continue collecting the garbage of others, like a beat of burden, sterile, hybrid, unquestioning”) and we also learn of his brother who operates a jackhammer on a road crew – Erasmo Wagner’s previous job – and of his cousin who works in sewerage.
Wagner himself is an ex-prisoner, convicted for the murder of a man who abused his younger brother and then killed his parents – and in prison taught himself to be “attentive to imminent fatality” and learnt not to search for meaning or love in life – making him perfectly suited to his role as someone who cleans up the trash that society produces – a role whose importance is seen when the trash truck drivers stage a strike.
Overall this is a short novella, one where the violence and brutality seems less gratuituous and dominant than “Between Dog Fights and Hog Slaughter”.
December 13, 2024
I am so grateful to be alive during a time when not only is Ana Paula Maia writing but her work is also being translated into English. I could spend an entire year doing nothing but reading about the lives of the men she writes about, and I feel grief every time I have to finish one of her stories. Her work, though deeply realistic, feels like magic to me, and I'm so excited to read more from her. I'm even tempted to learn Brazilian Portuguese so that I can devour her books that have already been published but have not yet been translated.
June 29, 2024
Three outstanding novellas that vaguely overlap by a mega-talented Brazilian author. Highly recommended for fans of violent, unflinching, and existential literary fiction. The kind that offers a fleeting but unmistakable halo of redemption. Beautiful, bold, and brilliant.
October 9, 2023
This novella collection has a fitting title. Maia’s writing is frank, cinematic, and harsh.
September 18, 2025
Brutal and gruesome and not always enjoyable to read but wonderfully vivid and sketched out with nuance
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews