Bury Your Dead by Ana Paula Maia
Ana Paula Maia's follow up to Of Cattle and Men is another taut and grotesque investigation of violence
Ana Paula Maia’s Bury Your Dead is a taut, brutal continuation of the world she built in Of Cattle and Men, once again following Edgar Wilson, now working as a roadkill collector. Circling the dangerous roads around a vast limestone quarry, Edgar moves through a landscape where human and animal death are omnipresent and where Maia's signature grotesque and frank prose breaks both down into their constituent parts.
Edgar’s grim rounds, punctuated by endless cups of thermos coffee, bring him into contact with the wrong kind of bodies: abandoned human corpses. The novel examines how our separation of people from animals is supposed to ensure human dignity but often does quite the opposite, especially when crumbling infrastructure and rural poverty erode the bonds within and between communities. Edgar, alongside an excommunicated priest whose presence adds a ritualistic melancholy to their morbid routine, finds himself in possession of bodies in search of graves in an echo of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
Maia’s concise and vivid rendering of the essential yet invisible labour that exists at society’s margins is a compelling read for fans of Cormac McCarthy’s scorched fatalism. But in circling the same roads, the same bodies, the same grim revelations, the narrative can feel repetitive and we remain largely on the surface of the characters’ minds. This restraint suits Maia’s style but may leave readers desiring a deeper psychological excavation.
