Onde pastam os minotauros
Where Minotaurs Graze
by Joca Reiners Terron
Todavia Livros, 2023
184 pages
14×21 cm
Populated by recognisable figures from the news and by minotaurs and spectres of various strains, this novel is a mixture of thriller and allegory centred on the revolt of a few oppressed people against the tyranny of capitalism and the disaster of civilisation.
Set in a Mato Grosso that is at once imaginary and disturbingly close to reality, where the dust «has the same colour as coagulated blood», Where Minotaurs Graze follows on from Joca Reiners Terron’s previous novels, in which the savage diagnosis of social reality is expressed through hallucinatory fabrication. Mythology, poetry and the country’s recent tragedies appear in a plot full of suspense, narrated almost minute by minute over the course of a day, but also punctuated by visions of the recent and distant past, like fragments of a dream making up a single great nightmare.
Terron relocates the myth of the Minotaur, that horrific, carnivorous hybrid of human body and bull’s head, deep in the Brazilian countryside. Somewhere in Mato Grosso, a huge slaughterhouse with its associated soya fields dominates a town as its sole employer. But the factory produces for export to Arab countries and the local employees have been replaced by Palestinian Muslims.
The laid-off workers stand with other starving people outside the fence, waiting for the customary handout of leftover bones on the last working day of the year.
But inside the slaughterhouse, two friends, Crente (Believer) and Cão (Dog), one of whom has just lost his wife to the pandemic and with it his faith, while the other is perhaps an hybrid creature himself, for he can hear the cattle speak, are planning an uprising. When a commission arrives late in the afternoon to investigate the possibility of kosher slaughter, the revolt breaks out. Cão, who planned it, is killed in the process, sacrificing himself to feed the hungry and free the cattle, but Crente and Cão’s girlfriend Lucy Fuerza, who in the meantime have blown open the company’s safe, manage to escape from the general destruction with the looted money.
With his powerful, empathetic and controlled pictorial language, Terron unfolds this apocalyptic story that exposes globalised capitalism as well as man’s ruthless treatment of the nature entrusted to him. At the end, despite everything, he hints at the hope that the path out of the labyrinth may lead to a more just world.
Here you can download an English BOOK PROFILE
Rights available: Italy
Represented in collaboration with Mertin Literary Agency
Joca Reiners Terron (1968) is a poet, writer and graphic designer. He was an editor at the independent Brazilian publishing house Ciência do Acidente and is now a regular contributor to the prestigious newspaper Folha de São Paulo and TV Cultura. Joca Terron has won the Prêmio Machado de Assis 2010 and was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature in 2011, 2018, and 2020.
