Crooked Plow

April 17, 2023
Brazilian writer Vieira Júnior’s alluring English-language debut traces the lives of twin sisters in rural Brazil after a catastrophic accident. Belonísia and Bibiana, five years old, discover an ivory-handled knife hidden by their grandmother. They each put the knife in their mouths, then fight over it, and one of them loses a tongue (it’s not immediately clear which of them it is). In the first part, Bibiana chronicles the farm labor, religious practices, and struggles of their family and neighbors in Água Negra, their remote community of Black subsistence farmers, and offers impressionistic views of the girls’ healer father: “He’d speak differently, he’d sing and whirl with wonderful agility around the room, endowed with the powers of the spirits of the forest, the waters, the mountains, the air.” The second part, narrated by Belonísia, picks up with the twins as young adults, revealing the limited choices they have for marriage and the dignity they scrape together. In the third act, a folkloric spirit named Santa Rita the Fisherwoman joins the twins to share secrets of their grandmother’s past involving the hidden knife. Vieira Júnior conveys the girls’ childhood confusion and wonder in hypnotic prose, and he brings the close-knit Água Negra to life. This heralds the arrival of a welcome voice.