Crooked Plow: A Novel

"Yes, it does share some things, but other aspects are significantly different. This is Vieira Junior’s first novel. He has published a collection of stories, and has since come out with a second novel. He comes to this from an academic background; he has a PhD in ethnic and African Studies. His doctoral research focused on the ongoing struggles of the quilombolas , the African-Brazilian communities organised by escaped slaves and their descendants. Crooked Plow is set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately a third of enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade. It’s a remote part of Brazil. Not a River is set in a remote part of Argentina. It does deal with similar kinds of poverty and violence. But there’s a significant difference in that Crooked Plow is also inflected by racial history. Crooked Plow is one of two books on our shortlist that have extraordinary openings. This one has a powerful, mysterious beginning. It’s about two sisters who discover their grandmother’s hidden knife and accidentally cut their tongues with it. One sister is cut badly, the other’s tongue is severed. These are injuries that bind them together emotionally, although they bear their scars in different ways. “To me, reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience which would otherwise be confined to one perspective or one life” The story follows the two sisters with alternating voices through the cruelties of life on the plantation as subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region, their marriages, the deaths of their husbands—one was a violent alcoholic, the other a union organiser who is shot. It’s told from the point of view of the girls, very close to the ground, with details about daily life, ceremonies, their father, the healer. And then it pulls back, shifting to more of an overview of what’s happening, with descriptions of the brutality of slavery, the political struggle, family. There’s something timeless in it. I was almost startled when a character goes off on a motorcycle, because you just feel you are in another world. Crooked Plow is a vivid tale which won many of the major literary awards in Brazil and became a bestseller. It offers a unique window into a world where the legacy of resistance and the fight for land rights weave through the personal and collective narratives of its characters. At the same time, it also reflects the global struggle for environmental preservation, social justice, and cultural identity."