The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo, tr. Sophie Lewis is published by Indigo Press.
Righteous indignation rarely produces good novels. The writer is too busy shouting from a soap-box to construct an absorbing narrative or believable characters. Happily, this is not the case with the Brazilian author Patrícia Melo. Although the theme of her novel is femicide, as is made explicit from the title itself: The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, Melo is too skilful a writer for the book to be merely a rant.
Melo is a Brazilian author of more than a dozen novels, and this book takes the reader a long way from the usual caricatures of life in Brazil — sun, beaches, carnival, or samba music. Indeed, one of the underlying themes of the novel is how little Brazilians know about their own country and its diverse peoples.
The book is the first-person narrative of a young woman lawyer sent by her firm in Saõ Paulo to investigate the number of women murdered by men in the remote region of Acre. (In her acknowledgements, Melo tells us that Acre had the highest femicide rate in Brazil, which was one of the reasons behind her writing the book). Acre was the last region to be incorporated into Brazil, the area being purchased from Bolivia in the late nineteenth century at the time of a boom in rubber production. Ever since, Acre has been Wild West border country, with drug trafficking and people smuggling rife, while the indigenous communities have been constantly harassed, even treated as slaves: ‘The rubber barons had arrived here from the North-East, armed to the teeth and fully intending to enslave the indigenous peoples in service of rubber plantations. Those who rebelled were either killed or forced to flee. Dozens of communities were devastated.’
Corruption and Impunity
It is the death of an indigenous woman, Txupira which particularly attracts the visiting lawyer’s attention. She befriends the local public prosecutor Carla, who is trying to bring three local youths to justice for Txupira’s rape and murder in the small city of Cruzeiro do Sul. The three accused are members of the local ‘rubber baron’ oligarchy that has held sway in Acre since the early days, and as such Carla has little hope that they will be found guilty: she sees corruption at every level, from the police to the forensic experts, and the entire judicial system.
Carla is proved right, and the three men are acquitted. Not satisfied with this result, the two women continue to investigate Txupira’s death. This takes the Saõ Paulo lawyer into the previously unknown world of Acre’s indigenous communities, still struggling against racism and constant inroads into their supposedly legally protected lands. Guided by a local woman, Zapira, she drinks the ayahuasca tea commonly used to produce visions that are both revelatory and healing: ‘Zapira explained that the drink could open many eyes for us, not our everyday eyes that saw stones and men and animals, but other eyes, she said, eyes that saw what was hidden, what was on the other side, what was invisible, eyes that saw inside kernels, that saw into thoughts, into the sky, into the great chasm of the night, eyes that saw the dead and the spirits.’
Despite the increasing hostility towards them, Carla and the narrator take their findings about the murder to Rita, a local journalist. She is brave enough to publish the accusations against the local men, and soon suffers what seems to be the inevitable consequence. As with any good thriller, the book climaxes with more violence and plot twists before the narrator manages tp escape to the other Brazil, chastened but enlightened.
‘Men kill us’
Melo’s novels always deal with the violence underlying life in contemporary Brazil. This novel’s theme lends itself to brutal descriptions, which author and translator do not shy away from, as in the description of Txupira’s dead body: ‘Her face was disfigured, her mouth gagged. Two ribs had been broken. There were welts all over her back, belly, neck, and chest. Her hands were tied and front teeth smashed in.’
Melo seems to have found her ideal translator in Sophie Lewis, who effectively captures not only the raw anger of some passages detailing how men have murdered women close to them but also made the dialogues seem smooth, and been up to the challenge of descriptions of exuberant jungle nature and the ayahuasca dream sequences.
As a male reader, I was hoping for some kind of redemption for us at the end, but unfortunately, in this novel at least, there is no escape: ‘You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us.’
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BookBlast interview – Sophie Lewis
Reviewed by Nick Caistor for BookBlast®. Author photo © Kyrhian Balmelli
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