A Spanish agricultural labourer arrives in a tidy Swiss village to work for a fastidious dairy farmer. Ambrosio is small, balding, inoffensive and eager to work. His boss Knuchel is a likeable traditionalist devoted to his herd, which is led by the magnificent Blosch, the mother of many bull calfs, a ruling presence in the cattle shed and an animal possessed of a strong sexuality. Through the most simple of plots, featuring as central characters an outsider and a cow, the enigmatic Beat Sterchi has created a powerful novel of genius.
Although Ambrosio quickly fits into his new world on the farm, playing with the children and instinctively understanding the various milkers, the villagers appear determined to keep him in his place. Foreigners are not welcome, particularly if a native can do the same work. The characterisation is subtle, Ambrosio is an adult returned to the status of child by virtue of not speaking the language.
What could be an atmospheric portrait of life amid the minor tensions of a small community juxtaposed with the happier domestic universe of a family farm where tradition is cherished, acquires far darker themes when the scene flashes forward seven years. Ambrosio has stayed in Innerwald, but he is now working in a slaughterhouse. The abattoir is staffed by an odd assortment of characters who have been assigned the gruesome array of jobs which result in the dismantling of an animal. At this stage one might expect to be warned that The Cow might not be ideal reading for the queasy. True, any narrative set largely in a slaughter house would seem to have a limited appeal, but Sterchi's exploration of various forms of power defies any preconceptions.
First published as Blosch in German in 1983 and then five years later in this English translation, Sterchi's extraordinary novel somehow disappeared in the decade since. Faber are to be commended for this re-issue which should change all that. Interestingly in this age of writer as personality, little is known of Sterchi - a Swiss German who may or may not have written anything else. Considering the tone shifts contained within the narrative, Sterchi is lucky to have a translator as gifted as the poet, Michael Hofmann, who has captured the internal voices and sensibility of this amazing novel. What could have become an angry polemic is instead a profound meditation. Hofmann, translator of his late father, novelist Gert Hofmann, and Herta Muller's surrealist portrait of Ceausescu's Romania, The Land of Green Plums, follows the narrative through its phrases of straightforward storytelling, its asides, the individual stories of some of the slaughterhouse workers and an angry, first-person lament, which appears to be that of one of the workers, yet could as easily be that of any outraged onlooker, either a man or a beast.
There is no sentimentality. The descriptions of the various stages of the slaughtering process are brutally exact. The animals are dismembered and reduced to parcels of skin. Early in the novel, in the first of the many scene shifts between the happy, ordered farm and the contrasting horrors of the slaughterhouse, Ambrosio watches Blosch walk to her death. The once beautiful animal has changed utterly.
It is presented as if it is a glimpse of the future: the end of a way of life, the end of farming. There is nothing simplistic about the characterisation of Blosch, she is a hero. The narrative returns to the story of daily life in a community in which the locals exchange banter and bait outsiders. Throughout much of the farming sequences, a massive woman pedals furiously up hills. Eventually she is introduced as the local midwife. It is but one of many deft touches. Sterchi allows his novel to unfold with a careful sense of pacing. No one could read The Cow without feeling angry and disgusted with the way the animals become our food.
Although it ends in an anarchic flourish as the men in the slaughterhouse rebel, The Cow is not about rebellion, it is about understanding, and most particularly about cruelty on many levels. Read Sterchi's astute allegory, one of the truly great contemporary European novels, wonder at it and then consider who are the bullies, who are the victims and what is power.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
