Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia's slender novel On Earth as It Is Beneath is a relentlessly brutal examination of inhumanity, translated by award-winning author Padma Viswanathan, who deftly captures Maia's unblinking, haunting prose. The titular "beneath" refers to "the enslaved people living here [who] were mostly tortured and killed"--then buried--over a century ago. After farming and livestock failures, the eponymous "earth" housed "a penal colony to serve as a model to the rest of the country, and from where not a single prisoner would ever escape."
Shortly after opening, faraway orders turn the Colony "into a place of extermination." On this cursed land, a man called Melquíades plays God, hunting prisoners on a regular schedule, "slaughtering [them] like he was slaughtering cattle." When the kill orders cease in preparation for decommissioning the property, 42 men remain, but Melquíades continues his murderous culling. For a while, the few men left believe the promised official will arrive to close the Colony and arrange their transfers elsewhere (some even to freedom). These final days are what Maia spotlights, uplifting the survivors' humanity despite their heinous pasts.
Maia unflinchingly, fearlessly exposes the hypocrisies of lazy labels: morality, rules, good, evil--none of that exists. Melquíades carries his father's Bible in his uniform pocket; prison guard Taborda blindly follows Melquíades's orders. Maia uses crisp phrasing and unadorned writing to contain the terror, as if extra words might unnecessarily prolong the inhumanity. With one man standing, she leaves readers with at least a single glimmer of hope. --Terry Hong