Patricia Melo

Sophie Lewis (translator)

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is about the problem of femicide in Brazil and it's also about the power of women in the face of overwhelming male violence, the power of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the power of the jungle to save us all.

Even before she begins compiling a list of women killed by their lovers, partners, and husbands in Brazil, the unnamed narrator of The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, a young lawyer, has experienced more violence than she remembers.

To escape from a newly aggressive boyfriend, she accepts an assignment in the Amazon. In the border town of Cruzeiro do Sul, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman. Through Carla, she learns about the violence that has become so commonplace in the jungle that women often beg to end the trials themselves, and from both of them she comes to know the state of Acre, the last place to be incorporated into Brazilian territory. There, she sees not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but the depth of her own longing: for the palpable taste of the wild, for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she is joined by a chorus of warrior women bent on revenging the men who killed them--and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother's death by her father when she was very young.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a novel that resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems to the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil, and it is a modern, exacting, sometimes humorous and fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

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