Esther, the Butcher - by Mariia Niskavaara (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Surprising, absurd, comic, and utterly extraordinary . . . anything but a conventional novel."--Jury of the Runeberg Prize (Finland)

Already an international sensation, this brilliantly grotesque, hauntingly surreal, and instantly gripping literary debut features one of the most intense voices of recent fiction: a young woman whose love for animal butchery is matched only by her desire to have a baby

All day, Esther slaughters. It's the only job she's ever done; it's the only job she wants to do.

For Esther, life is simple and beautiful. She has no dreams of leaving the place she was born, an industrial town dwarfed by a massive meat factory. As a baby, Esther was weaned on aspic and sausage, and as a teenager she loved nothing more than working at her parents' butcher shop, digging her hand into a tub of freshly ground minced meat and imagining her own body as flesh that someone might one day touch as lovingly. As an adult, Esther's life falls perfectly into place: she obtains her dream job in the Factory's slaughterhouse, then snags a middle-class husband, an artificial inseminator of sows at the town's pig farm. There is only one thing missing: a child.

Esther longs deeply for the time when she will create flesh of her own flesh, but try as the couple do, she does not fall pregnant. Parental pressure mounts, and Esther's small town pulses with rumor as her coworkers stare openly at her unswelling belly. But Esther's body is hiding secrets of which even she is unaware--her flesh is not weak, and her spirit even stronger.

Influenced by Franz Kafka and with the freshness and intensity of Sayaka Murata and Olga Tokarczuk, Mariia Niskavaara takes her place as one of the most exciting young voices to come out of Europe in recent years. A tender master of the surreal, she shows us the extreme reality of womanhood under contemporary capitalism and asks the thought-provoking question: are we really anything more than meat?

Review Quotes

Praise for Esther, the Butcher:

"Esther, the Butcher demonstrates exceptional literary imagination and reveals its author's profound understanding of literature--from the Bible to Franz Kafka."--Jury of the Helsingin Sanomat Debut Prize

"Esther, the Butcher is anything but a conventional novel. Its narrative is surprising, absurd, comic, and utterly extraordinary. The book brims with flesh and corporeality to the point of revulsion, its sentences honed to a razor's edge. In its strangeness, it shines with such irresistible clarity that the reader is drawn into its oddity--and may never fully shake it off. Niskavaara's voice is distinctive, and the work's literary stance thoroughly peculiar. Its ethics--or rather, its lack thereof--make for invigorating reading, while its style invites comparison to Kaurismäki's films, Daniil Kharms's writings, and the storytelling of fairy tales."--Jury of the Runeberg Prize

"I read almost faint with amazement at what Niskavaara's imagination conjures. I love her blunt matter-of-fact sentences and absurd characters. There's the Perfect Woman, who has undergone a navel-removal operation. There's the Nude Model, who has pig's teats. The book is nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize. I'm not surprised. This grotesque fairy tale is wild and violent--but also wildly brilliant."--Venla Pystynen, Kodin kuvaleht

About the Author

Mariia Niskavaara is an author originally from Valkeakoski, Finland and knows what it is like to grow up in a small factory town. She is preparing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Turku on the aesthetics of meat, the body, and decay. Her debut novel Esther, the Butcher, has been published or is forthcoming in more than thirty countries worldwide.

Kate Sotejeff-Wilson midwifes texts for academics and the arts, translating from Finnish, Polish and German and editing in English. Born in Wales to an English father and a Polish mother, she is now also a Finn. She has been translating since 1999 and is happiest in the space between languages.