Argentinian writer Selva Almada explores violence and masculinity in rural Argentina with this tale about two patriarchs in the brickmaking trade. Although they are rivals, their teenage sons have fallen in love, and other family members get caught in the drama.
Almada is forceful in her depictions of sex, violence, and rage. I feel her prose in my body: a punch in the gut, the sharpness of glass. McDermott’s translation captures the bite of Almada’s sentences, which render both tenderness and violence with devastating clarity ... Almada’s novel illustrates the physical toll machismo takes on everyone: men, women, children, and families. But Brickmakers also celebrates women who are strong, who bear up their families on their backs, because they have to. Because there is no other choice.
... intense, eloquent ... not a conventional murder mystery—it is a picture of the destructive power of machismo on the indigenous men and women of this community ... a vivid group portrait ... Annie McDermott’s new, highly readable translation makes Almada’s superb 2013 novel available for the first time to Anglophone readers. It is bound to make the reader hungry for more of Almada’s award-winning work.
An unflinching awareness of death compels the work of Selva Almada ... There is a tremendous carnality to Almada’s writing, vividly captured in McDermott’s translation.
