THE LONDON BOOK FAIR — A new trend I noticed at the London Book Fair: young European novelists writing about butchers and the meat industry. There’s a Dutch book by Manik Sarkar called Ossenkop (ox head) about a young butcher whose business is getting threatened by a big supermarket, and a French novel called Les bouchères (the women butchers) about a young woman who takes over her family’s butcher shop. And then there’s Esther the Butcher, a very successfully translated debut novel by the Finnish writer Mariia Niskavaara — a universally loved book by everyone I spoke to about it at the fair, even if its love for meat seemed a little shameful.
Books about blood, the smell of meat, the pride in different cuts, in killing the animal painlessly: in our current environmental reality, these books seems an expression of a sort of nostalgia for something that’s become almost taboo.
