Itamar Vieira Junior

23. Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior
OPD: 2018, translation: from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz (2023)
format: 276-page paperback
acquired: Library loan read: Apr 13-19 time reading: 8:58, 2.0 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: Bahia, Brazil
about the author: Brazilian writer from born in Salvador, Bahia in 1979. He also grew up in Pernambuco and São Luís. He was the first recipient of the Milton Santos Scholarship, dedicated to low-income black youth.

My 5th book from the International Booker longlist, and another on the shortlist. This is a nice novel and really popular on the Booker Prize-run Facebook Booker Prize Book Club. It's the story of the descendants of Brazilian slaves, focused on two sisters in a tenant farm family, children of a healer, and connected through the accident with a knife that leaves them sharing one tongue.

As a reader, I first appreciated the elegant language of one sister, who tells how the sisters now speak as one. Then the other sister speaks, and the language becomes more practical without changing the book's tone. Through both we learn about their community, and their father, a traditional healer who becomes possessed by an African-originated encantada, a female spirit, on the festival for St. Barbara.

These are the descendants of Brazilian slaves who continued to work farms as unpaid tenant farmers, working for no pay. They could build mud houses, and only mud houses, and raise their own food, but got nothing else from the crops they worked. Generation changes mean many things, including gratitude for work turning to resentment towards profit-hungry absent landlords as lives come to nothing. But what maybe makes this book special, other than its suite of characters, including the sisters who share one tongue, is the mythology - the mixture of African spirits, here "encantados", with Catholic mythologies and sainted martyrs. Of course, these, too, fade with the generations.

What I didn't know while reading was the modern story of Quilombos. Quilombos were communities of free black escaped slaves in Brazil, and now are their descendants. Making up a small population, they are a centerpiece in Brazilian politics. Lula da Silva, president 2003-2010, was a more leftwing president, fronted the rights of Quilombos. Whereas Jair Bolsonaro, president 2019-2022, a right-wing extremist, prominently singled out Quilombos in 2017 as lazy, spurring on, Trump-like, his racist base. This book was published in 2018 in Brazil, but only translated to English last year.

I'm not quite as enthused as some on this novel. There is an unoriginality to the language in translation, and maybe the agenda simplifies things a little. But it rewards, and the encantados are fascinating. Worth a read.

2024
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