Overview

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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9781632063465

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Reviews

"Praise for The Simple Art of Killing a Woman ""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 in the variable structure of her chapters. 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 first of the author with a female protagonist. In addressing a sad reality, Patrícia wanted to blend the plot with a little fable. Mulheres Empilhadas is a work of fiction that brushes with real events."" -- Ana Clara Brant, Jornal Estado de Minas ""This is the subject of Patrícia Melo's great new book . . . Based on real events in Cruzeiro do Sul, the lawyer investigates cases and hears testimonies of the tragic stories of women who have been piled into oblivion and impunity . . . The most striking thing is the metamorphosis of the protagonist, rational and modern, in her experience with the old indigenous women and their ancestral myths and spells, in visions of breathtaking beauty."" -- Nelson Motta, O Globo ""It is literature inspired by life. It is fiction constructed within the pages of a book illustrating the real events that weigh every day on the pages of newspapers and news websites. It is a woman crying out for all the others. An urgent novel that instigates and denounces."" -- 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, out of fear, is silenced. The doubts, the feeling of guilt, the discoveries and, after so many male voices in her works, the profusion of different female characters."" -- Roberta Pinheiro, Correio Braziliense"

Author Information

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.

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