“Who said that flesh is sad? Flesh is not sad, it is sinister. It belongs on the left side of our souls, it catches us at times of the greatest abandonment, carries us over deep seas, scuttles us and saves us; flesh is our guide, our dense black light, the well which draws our life down in a spiral, sucking it into oblivion.”

The butcher is fat, with milky white skin. He is fleshy like the meat he slices up. He eyes the women who come into the shop, in their summer dresses.

“Doubtless he would have loved to touch all those breasts and all those buttocks, manipulate them in his expert hands like so many cuts of meat. The butcher had flesh in his soul.”

While she sits on her stool at the cash register, the butcher talks to her, whispering sweet nothings in an increasingly explicit manner, in what she describes as “our game, our precious device for annihilating the world.” Meanwhile the girl grieves over her lost love, Daniel, a boy who hardly knew she existed, who took her virginity thoughtlessly, because it happened to be on offer. Aroused by the attentions of the butcher, she writes imaginary letters to this boy, beautiful lyrical passages that he is hardly worthy of.

“To swim in your light, in your night of heavy velvet, in your flashes of silk. If only my words had the force of this love which makes a hole in my stomach and causes me pain. Strange, impossible enigma never to be resolved, exclamation mark which will always hold me upright in danger, standing on my head and racked with an overbearing dizziness.”

The proximity of meat is the proximity of death, the inevitability of it. It also points to the importance of the physical world, the demands of the flesh. But the novella goes further into its fleshy subject than this. A man comes into the shop, terribly disfigured, his face a formless mass. While the sight frightens the girl, there is also great compassion. This is not a novel about beautiful people.

As the first section of the book progresses, the tension builds up in the butcher’s words, in the erotically charged atmosphere of the shop, and in the beautiful prose of the book which becomes breathless at times, quite literally, in the temporary abandonment of punctuation.

The death represented in the meat around her also comes to symbolise the death of her love for Daniel.

“When the butcher is in my body Daniel we will be dead our story will be dead and will become the touchstone of my coming sorrows the butcher with his sharpened blade the butcher with his blade will cleave my belly and we will depart from the belly where we were we will have no more love enough in our hands to touch each other again…”

Part one of the book is the literary foreplay, while part two moves from fantasy and talk into reality. And while the action is explicit and raw, still the lyricism remains. The sex proves cathartic:

“I laughed as I thought about Daniel, our bungled lovemaking, his shoddy sanity.”

The narrator is an artist who specialises in miniature paintings. This book is the literary equivalent. The prose is beautifully stark, undiluted, heady. There is a point in the novel where the girl is struggling to represent the physical world in a painting:

“Daniel. I tried to paint a bunch of roses. Don’t laugh. How do you render the colour of a rose, its softness, its delicacy, its scent? Nevertheless, I desire them, I attempt them, I circle around.

Are we not stupid to want to capture the world with our pens and our brushes at the end of our right hands? The world does not know us, the world escapes us.”

In The Butcher, Reyes does what her character struggles to do, she captures the world of the flesh. Her translator, David Watson, deserves credit too for capturing the tone and beauty of the original work so well. Originally published in 1988, this novella is an erotic tour de force which sparked a renaissance in erotic literature. It’s a very small book that packs a very big punch, and it’s worth every penny.

RATING: 10/10

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Kara Kellar Bell is a 38 year old film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

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© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.