Review of Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath, longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Explore Ana Paula Maia's chilling novella, "On Earth As It Is Beneath," a harrowing reflection on violence and survival in a brutal prison.

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath, envisioned for English readers by Canadian author and translator Padma Viswanathan, is a taut horror. It tells the story of a brutal prison warden’s descent into madness as he transforms his penal colony into a hunting ground and treats the few remaining inmates like livestock. 

As food dwindles and the sweltering heat rises, the desperate prisoners must rely on their primal instincts to survive. Thus, Maia explores the terrifying reality that emerges when the boundary between man and beast melts. The slim novella is on this year’s longlist for the International Booker Prize.

The colony is built atop a former plantation where enslaved people were historically tortured and murdered, with later attempts at ordinary life repeatedly collapsing into sickness, fire, disappearance, and abandonment. Maia paints a picture of a landscape literally saturated with atrocities, where every attempt to dig into the earth yields human remains, leading to the gut-wrenching realisation that the colony’s brutality is only the latest iteration of Brazil’s foundational violence.

The novel, published in the original Portuguese in 2017, is entirely populated by men, set in an isolated, hermetically sealed pressure cooker of violence. Yet, the architects of this narrative are women. The text is guided by Maia’s female authorial gaze that strips the hyper-masculine Colony of its traditional patriarchal glamour. There is no idealised brotherhood, no glorious final stand. Instead, Maia’s autopsy, rendered with surgical precision by Viswanathan’s translation, reveals a pathetic ouroboros.

Bronco Gil comes of age when he learns to gut wild boars without vomiting. Melquíades inherits his violent masculinity from his policeman father, a man who read the Bible but killed criminals with the same indifference he applied to hunting. Left entirely to their own devices, these men build and inhabit a hellscape. Male authors writing about male prisons or violent outlaws often romanticise the ‘tough guy’, but Maia refuses to validate the violence and Viswanathan preserves the detachment.

On Earth’s human suffering comes up in the tight, present-tense narrative and the vocabulary of the slaughterhouse. A dying dog is buried with a hoe in one scene while dead human prisoners are dragged on tarps encrusted with blood and dumped into rocky, shallow graves in the next. The translator’s selection of Anglo-Saxon verbs creates a matter-of-fact language to describe profound atrocities.