Book of the Week: OF CATTLE AND MEN by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Zoë Perry)
The abattoir has an unspoken centrality to Brazilian rural culture, just as it has in New Zealand. In Ana Paula Maia’s superbly, sparely written novel, set in a slaughterhouse in an impoverished and isolated corner of Brazil, the established tension between repetitive killing and the unthinking acceptance functionally necessary for its continuance — for both humans and cattle — is unbalanced by something seemingly beyond the contained and ritualised world of rural meat production. What is it that is driving the men, and the animals, to madness and murder?