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

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.

A ledger of actions

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.

Author Ana Paula Maia (left), and translator Padma Viswanathan, of ‘On Earth As It Is Beneath’, longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Much of the story is a ledger of actions: bury the dog, peel the potatoes, butcher the boar, salt the hide, mend the sock, hang the trophy, polish the boots, remove the tag, start the stopwatch, fire the rifle. Viswanathan captures this machine-gun rhythm perfectly, allowing the syntax to mimic the repetitive labour of survival. The narration lingers on craft and process, such as the careful steps of taxidermy and curing a hide, down to salt and potassium alum, and waiting two months for ants to strip a skull. The place is itself invasively material, with its sweat, rot, tools, dirt, meats, bones, and odours forcing us, alongside the inmates, to face the unacceptable.

Justifying the atrocity

On Earth is reminiscent of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called ‘bare life’. Across Homo Sacer and The Open, Agamben argued politics in modernity increasingly works by creating and maintaining a split within the human: a speaking and rights-bearing figure on one side and an exposed biological organism on the other. And sovereign power makes its presence felt by reducing the former to the latter. The ultimate figure of this is the homo sacer — a person stripped of all legal rights and who can be killed by anyone without consequence yet who cannot be used in a religious sacrifice because their life has lost all value.

In the penal colony, law is suspended and Melquíades wields absolute power over life and death. When he hunts J with a rifle and a stopwatch, he is slaughtering biological material.

It’s impossible in the end to not recognise the sprawling architecture of our own state of exception. The pandemic laid bare the state as it presumed to roll out untested drugs and therapies, treating the population as bodies available to serve its political ends. 

The same calculus is evident in today’s strongmen and their foot soldiers transforming borders and cities into macrocosms of the Penal Colony. They continuously designate minorities and dissidents to subjugate, justifying the atrocity through the same hollow myths of blood and brotherhood.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in

On Earth As It Is Beneath

Ana Paula Maia, trs Padma Viswanathan

Charco Press

₹1,265

Published – March 06, 2026 08:11 am IST