The Simple Art of Killing a Woman
From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression--by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.
To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region's women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance--and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother's early death.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.
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Patrícia Melo was born in 1962 and is a highly regarded novelist, playwright and scriptwriter. She has been awarded a number of internationally renowned prizes, including the Jabuti Prize 2001, the German LiBeraturpreis 2013 and the German Crime Award 1998 and 2014; she was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Time Magazine included her among the Fifty Latin American Leaders of the New Millenium.
Sophie Lewis translates from the French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Sheyla Smanioto, and João Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Emilie de Turckheim's novel Héloïse is Bald was commended for the 2016 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and her translation of Noémi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was shortlisted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize. In 2016 she launched Shadow Heroes, which designs and delivers workshops on translation for students at GCSE and above.
"Women rise defiant against misogynistic forces in the truth-filled novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman. While the dead cannot be resurrected, lives might be spared with knowledge--and via feminist alliances." -- Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
"Brazilian author Melo weaves together crime, magical realism, mythology, and social criticism in this relevant and urgent translation from the Portuguese by Lewis. Though the subject is horrifying, especially in the details about marred and dismembered victims, the narrator's voice is captivating and compelling, offering strength and purpose rather than despair." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Melo's thoughtful first-person narrative and starkly powerful verse interwoven with reports of murdered women fluidly bears the weight of a gripping crime story and fearless social commentary." --Christine Tran, Booklist
"Patrícia Melo explodes the boundaries between two worlds with energy and colour. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vibrates with rage at femicide and glows with hallucinatory images of jaguars and Amazons." -- Martina Läubli, New Journal of Zürich
"Melo's blackest novel to date and her best, a formal and stylistic high point in her work. The protagonist finds a way out of powerlessness into a self-determined life. 'Literature', says Melo, 'is a space for resistance', especially in dark times. It is again more necessary than ever." -- Dagmar Kaindl, Buchkultur
"Brazil has a problem with femicides. It often takes years for a court case to be initiated and a few years longer if the victim was poor, Black, or indigenous. Melo makes the fates of real victims visible in her latest novel. Her determination to pursue a certain style, the freedom with which she writes confidently around generic set pieces, is evident at first glance. . . . Melo puts words into a singing rhythm, arranges them in verse so that they unfold as poems." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"Patrícia Melo's novel is a powerful plea against male violence, not a diatribe but a brilliantly composed piece of literature." -- Marcus Müntefering, Der Freitag
"Engaging and well-written, the book is the author's first to have a female protagonist. In addressing a sad reality, Melo has chosen to blend the plot with a little fable. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a work of fiction that depicts real-life events." -- Ana Clara Brant, Jornal Estado de Minas
"Femicide is the subject of Patrícia Melo's excellent new book. . . . Based on real events in Cruzeiro do Sul, a lawyer investigates cases and hears testimonies of the tragic stories of women who have been relegated to oblivion. . . . Most striking is the metamorphosis of our rational, modern protagonist and her experience with indigenous women and their ancestral knowledge, in visions of breathtaking beauty." -- Nelson Motta, O Globo
"This is literature inspired by life. This is fiction constructed within the pages of a book illustrating the real events that shout every day from the pages of newspapers and news websites. Here is one woman crying out for all women. An urgent novel that galvanizes and condemns." -- Jornal do Brasil
"With writing that is direct and at the same time strong and poetic, the author turns into literature the reality reported in newspaper headlines that are often hard to believe. From judicial and legislative issues to the first sign of violence that is silenced out of fear. The doubts, the sense of guilt, the discoveries and, after so many male voices in her works, the profusion of different female characters." -- Roberta Pinheiro, Correio Braziliense
"The Simple Art... is set in an oppressive but at the same time paradisiacal environment. Melo describes the Amazon rainforest as an intensely sensual place. Her novel is also a declaration of love for the world of the Amazonian natives." -- Victoria Eglau, Deutschlandfunk, Köln
"This thriller is also, more than anything, a horrifying survey of femicide in Brazil. . . . A merciless indictment that includes litanies of victims' names, their killers' professions, and descriptions of brutal ill treatment, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is as dark, tough, direct, and angry as its title. There's no room for doubt." -- Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir
"Patrícia Melo has abandoned the thriller genre, in which she has excelled for more than twenty-five years, to create a book of many facets: mingling suspense, social fiction, and a drop of mystical poetry." -- Nathalie Ricci, Nice-Matin
"Patrícia Melo has written a social thriller that is dark, brutal and intoxicating. . . . Her brand of realism, by turns raw and magical, and her fierce activist drive, leavened with humour despite the seriousness of her subject, turns these shell-shocked 'piles of women' into a vertiginous whirlwind from which we emerge irreversibly sobered." -- Julie Malaure, Le Point
"In this powerful and very beautiful novel, Patrícia Melo faces the violence done to women head-on. . . . In this world suspended somewhere between dream and reality, Melo condemns the state-sanctioned massacre of Brazilian women, the fate especially reserved for indigenous people and, also, the destruction of Brazil's forests. Her urgent and sensual style makes the novel unforgettable." -- Aurélie Baudrier, Page des Libraires
