Autumn of strange flesh

Winner of the 2023 Sesc Prize, "Autumn of Strange Meat" invites us to delve into the mud of Serra Pelada, combining memories of the mining and fiction. With his sensitive and penetrating writing, Airton Souza tells the love story between miners Zuza and Manel, in a land where both men and the land are brutalized.

"Autumn of Strange Meat ," by Airton Souza from Pará, is set against the backdrop of the infamous and tragic Serra Pelada, the world's largest open-pit gold mine, exploited by thousands of men in the 1980s. In this land fragmented by hoes, marked by greed and violence, the novel blends historical fact and fiction to tell the story of Zuza and Manel, two prospectors who fall in love, and Zacarias, a priest anguished by his own cassock. The three protagonists try, at all costs, to achieve their goal: to find a large quantity of gold and thus earn a living.

Airton's writing speaks the languages of the North and the gold mines to delve into a part of Brazilian history that, to this day, has rarely been explored in literature—Serra Pelada. The damp earth, the landslides, and the smell of the mines are the setting for a story in which boundaries perhaps no longer exist between the sacred and the profane, between death and eroticism—constant dualisms faced by the characters. Although the obsession with gold and the brutality of those who command the mines create a violent, murderous, and lonely atmosphere, the narrative's tenderness embraces its characters so that they can somehow escape the suffocation of repression, allowing them to love and be loved. It's no wonder that, for writers Joca Reiners Terron and Suzana Vargas, who wrote the book's blurb, the passion between Zuza and Manel represents "the love that embodies the struggle of existing amidst a morally ill group, whether through ambition or fanaticism."

" Autumn of Strange Flesh is a minimalist epic about the dream of gold in Serra Pelada, a former gold mine in southeastern Pará, about homosexuality in inhospitable territory and the resulting violence, with moving protagonists and a lyricism that shines through skin covered in sweat and mud." - Joca Reiners Terron and Suzana Vargas