It’s not every day that a protagonist admits they’re a murderer, but that’s exactly what slaughterhouse worker Edgar Wilson does in Ana Paula Maia’s novella Of Cattle and Men, translated by Zoë Perry. When a student asks Edgar whether he thinks killing cows is a crime and if he considers himself a murderer, he replies to each question with “I do” (49). But when asked “aren’t you ashamed,” Edgar’s reply implicitly turns the question on the inquirer: “Have you ever eaten a hamburger?...And how do you think it got there?” (49-50). If it’s easy to judge Edgar for admitting his gruesome work is murder, asking how the hamburgers get made bridges the gap between the apparent wrongdoer and the one passing moral judgment, whether the fictional student or Maia and Perry’s reader. The question of “how do you think it got there?” underpins the entire exploration of industrial capitalism and human responsibility at the core of this book: neatly packaged meat products come from sentient cows and the struggling people who kill them. In the magical realist world of Of Cattle and Men, escaping the horror may require more than closing the book and walking away.

Set in an isolated corner of modern Brazil, Of Cattle and Men centers on a slaughterhouse of cows and their killers. Protagonist Edgar Wilson prides himself on his efficiency and neatness as the stunner, believing his technique of blessing each cow before precisely bludgeoning them unconscious prevents pain during throat-slitting. Yet while Edgar absently dreams of working at a nearby pig farm, personnel shakeups in the slaughter line and shipments of foreign, quirky cows threaten Edgar’s peace. Amid inexplicably distressing cow behavior, Edgar must decide how much more blood he wants on his hands.

Of Cattle and Men builds tension and discomfort from the strangeness of slaughterhouses and the grit of slaughter. When one of Edgar’s coworkers dies suspiciously, his boss shrugs it off, thinking that “just as no one questions death in the slaughterhouse,” the death of one whose “rational faculties were on par with the ruminants” will “surely be ignored” (23-24). Where industry lets death go unexamined, life no longer matters to the industrialist. Indeed, the violence of the book cleaves through grounded, unsparing writing. Edgar’s particularly stunning ritual may involve gentle hushing and precise force, but Maia and Perry detail how his strikes result “in loss of consciousness caused by cerebral hemorrhage” and another stun operator’s “poorly aimed blow” leaves a cow “groaning on the floor” and writhing in pain (3). The near-painless stun and the excruciating blow both result in the same horrible death. In turn, death seeps through the landscape, stressing workers, depressing cows, and literally poisoning the region’s central river with waste. The nightmare Maia and Perry describe stems both from bizarrely casual disregard for humanity and harshly realistic depredation of our surroundings.

For me, this tight balance between unreality and grit worked best when the prose focused on the action and setting of each scene, rather than the occasional peek at a character’s thoughts. Indeed, for much of the book, Edgar’s actions and dialogue represent an enigma that contrasts well with the cows we can’t fully understand, but whom he believes he must save. Maia and Perry are not interested in proposing a simple moral or a path forward as much as asking us what we owe other animals, and if anything, the story understates the bovine case as individuals with rich family lives, friendships, and even occasional tool use. Of Cattle and Men isn’t always an easy read, but that’s all the more reason to ruminate.