This WITMonth, it’s my pleasure to feature a multi-award-winning feminist tornado of a novel recently arrived in English.

Out of Earth by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto came onto my radar when Sophie Lewis, who translated the book with Laura Garmeson, contacted me about it. I rarely accept review copies these days – I would be inundated if I did and I like to buy most of the books I feature on this blog in order to support fellow writers. (I also rarely feature books when they are newly published as I think the very small window of time titles get to succeed is one of the many problems with the publishing industry today so I try to do what I can to keep good books visible for longer by reviewing older titles.)

In this case, however, I decided to make an exception. Having admired Lewis’s work for many years and knowing how passionate she is about championing bold and daring translations (she was one of the original driving forces behind groundbreaking indie publisher And Other Stories), I was pretty sure this book would be something special. And I wasn’t wrong.

At this point in a review I would normally give a brief overview of the plot. In the case of Out of Earth, that’s tricky because this is not a book that plays by the rules. The linear and-then-and-then-and-then of storytelling has no place here. Rather, the narrative expounds the realities of inherited trauma and domestic violence, using the experience of four generations of women in the arid Brazilian sertão as a lens through which to reveal painful truths.

Language itself is at war with accepted modes of expression in this novel. Evasive, skewed and sometimes choric, the narrative voice courts ambiguity, teetering repeatedly on the verge of nonsense and shrugging off the rules of grammar to invite and dismiss multiple interpretations of even simple claims. Take the second paragraph:

He whistles, Tonho does. Calls the dog over right up close. The dog hesitates, tail lowered. The dog hesitates, then comes. It wants to know why the calling. Then he strikes the animal on the flank, yelping softly. The dog, not Tonho. The dog lies dying, slowly slowly. Not Tonho, he likes listening to the faltering barks of the dog on the ground guts blood bone breath. Tonho’s, not the dog’s. But right before the dog dies, in that very moment, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was the dog and which was Antônio.

Comprehension and interpretation, the text signals, are partial and contingent, forever shifting. We can never be confident we have fully got the measure of what is happening or who it is happening to, as the following clause or sentence may rewrite what has gone before or require us to revise our impressions.

This linguistic signposting provides a key to much of what follows. Over the ensuing pages victims morph into witnesses and the traumatised reenact their traumas even as they try to protect their younger relatives. ‘Have you noticed how babies newly born are just a heap of people thrown together?’ asks the narrative. In this book grown people are heaps of other people thrown together too, such that we can rarely be sure where one ends and another begins. With this interbleeding of selfhood and experience comes a strange strain of dramatic irony, granting use eerie foreknowledge of how certain moments will play out because we have read something like them before.

Yet, for all its ambiguity – for all that the lens through which we look is smeared and flyblown – the narrative has moments of searing clarity. At points, the language focuses daylight on dark areas so intensely that it almost scorches us. Here’s how Smanioto et al present Tonho as he visits the full force of his fury on Fátima:

He’s beating again: for suffering in others. He’s beating everything under the sun he’s beating. He beats he sees no body, he beats, beats, beats he sees no body, he beats beats beats not a single dog he beats. He doesn’t see any body at all he doesn’t see anything until he stumbles across Fátima he doesn’t see any Fátima in the midst of so much Tonho until he comes across Fátima at death’s door.

Uncomfortably, in this work centring female experience, it is the psychology of the male abusers that gives rise to some of the most powerful and memorable writing. Smanioto provides several brilliant instances of the mechanisms of self-justification as men perpetrate horrors on female bodies. These moments of ruthless, undeniable action feel shocking and sharp; but in the context of the swirling ambiguity of much of the rest of the text, they are oddly welcome too.

For this is perhaps the most profound and troubling thing this book shows us: storytelling as we are used to experiencing it is in itself a problematic and potentially exploitative thing. In their requirement for doer and done to, for causality and conclusions, for the casting of characters into recognisable, defined roles, traditional narratives force through choices and demand the supremacy of certain readings, leaving little space for multiple, conflicting or blurred perspectives.

‘Reading: devouring the hunger of others,’ reads a section heading towards the end. With her exploded poem of a book Smanioto obliges us to confront the role our appetites play in the perpetuation of such hunger.

Out of Earth by Shela Smanioto, translated from the Portuguese by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis (Boiler House Press, 2023)

Picture: ‘sertao casa flamboyant’ by Maria Hsu on flickr.com