The Calf

This remarkable Brazilian novel has been garlanded with multiple awards and accolades since its initial publication, as Desesterro: the prestigious Sesc Prize for Literature, the Machado de Assis award and the Jabuti award. The story follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertao. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.