Bury Your Dead
by Ana Paula Maia
Translated by Padma Viswanathan
Edgar Wilson works as a roadkill collector, clearing the roads of a remote area of Brazil of the bodies of animals that die on the road and taking them to a facility where the remains are ground down for use as fertiliser. His workmate is Tomás, a defrocked Catholic priest who still dispenses blessings to road-crash victims he encounters while doing his rounds. When Edgar discovers two human bodies within days of each other, the two embark on a Kafkaesque, tragicomic road trip in an attempt to give the victims, at the least, some dignity in death.
Ana
Paula Maia’s 2019 novel Bury Your Dead, published by Charco Press in a translation
by Padma Viswanathan, is easily one of the bleakest, grittiest and grimiest
books I’ve read in a while. The landscape against which Edgar plies his trade
is barren and forbidding, seemingly haunted by violence, death and
putrefaction. If ever the term “God-forsaken” were to apply literally, it would
be suitable for this stretch of Brazil. The atmosphere is oppressive, claustrophobic.
Yet this is also an intensely spiritual and, ultimately, hopeful novel. In the
face of death and futility, the characters seem to be seeking a higher meaning.
For Tomás, this takes the form of ministering to the dying, even though no longer
in the context of a church; for Edgar, it lies in trying to act decently and
humanely in a cut-throat world.
And
acting decently includes giving dignity to the dead. This is one of the
“corporal works of mercy” in the Christian tradition, as well as a principle
embedded in many cultures. Maia's brief but intensely poetic and philosophical
novel thus finds unexpected grace in a landscape of death and decay. It is a
powerful work that has sent me looking for other novels by the same author.
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