Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz (International Booker Prize 2024) “On this land, it’s the strongest who survive.”

Once you get past the ridiculous cover, which looks like a third grader drew it, you find an intriguing book about the poor in Brazil.

It begins with a shocking story of two sisters, who, while unwrapping a hidden knife of their grandmother’s, manage to cut their mouths. They have put the shiny blade up to their lips, to taste the mirrored metal, and in grabbing it from her sister, one of the girl’s tongues is severed. One must speak for the other hereafter.

It is a perfect metaphor for the way that the poor tenants on a landowner’s property have no voice.

Vieira paints a vivid portrait of these people, in their houses built of mud, in the way that women are subject to their husbands, in the poverty the community endures.

But, there is also a magical quality, of the encantadas that are sung, and the food which is shared. The sisters’ father is a healer, able to apply roots and herbs to cure the sick.

What appeared most often at our door were maladies of the divided spirit – people who had somehow lost their stories, lost their memories. People separated from themselves, people you couldn’t distinguish from wild beasts.

p. 31

Although their land was owned by the Peixoto family, and Suterio managed the farm, it was the people who made the land productive. While their father seemed content, to some degree, to keep this arrangement stable, his children fought against it. And in so doing, lives are lost.

Belonisia, the sister who lost her tongue, tells us, “My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.” (p. 129)

Had the curiosity that led me to the knife with the ivory handle been directed elsewhere, I’d have discovered the person I might have been. For my mouth has so many stories to tell, stories that could have inspired our community, our children, to cast off their servitude to the owners of the fields and of the city houses where my people work.

p. 176

I am left with a sense of despair, wondering how things will ever change. “…why do we want the things that are unattainable?” (p. 258)