BOOK REVIEW THE CALF Author: Aurora Freijo Corbeira From the reader report by: Margareth Santos La ternera is a punch in the stomach. As much for the precision of its writing as for its content. A chromatic, tactile, olfactory and visceral novel. All that without making use of easy narrative resources, nor of scatology or the profane verb. On the contrary, the work aligns a fabric hard to stitch together: the childish vision and the mediation of the adult voice of the teller. And this suture is woven by a direct and still poetic, although painful writing. It portrays the story of a 5-year-old girl who suffers sexual abuse by a neighbor —a butcher— with whom she snacks every afternoon, because of the busy life of her father, a salesman worried about his customers, and a poet mother, distracted in her verses. The so busy parents ignore what is happening right in front of their eyes, and are unable to perceive the child’s process of self-absorption, marked by long silences, growing apathy, and acts of resistance, such as not eating meat anymore. This self-defense mechanism shapes powerful images, such as the scene in which the mother prepares a piece of porterhouse meat (hence the title): the domestic act sparks off a long reflection triggered by the nauseating sight of the posters advertising the types of meat in the butcher’s shop: the meat on sale, choice meat, prime meat, in other words, porterhouse meat. As the girl elaborates the distinction of porterhouse meat as expensive, tender, tasty, she comes to the striking conclusion that she was not only first-class meat, but, above all, “first-time” meat. The powerful image is built in a fragmentary and synesthetic fashion: the reader can even hear the uncomfortable silences disseminated throughout her “micro-reports”, and get entangled in the viscosity of a work that ends as uncomfortable as in its beginning, with a vigorous and necessary prose.
PUBLISHED IN NEW SPANISH BOOKS DE | FR
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