Cow by Beat Sterchi is something more than a story of a Spanish worker and a cow. Sterchi apprenticed as a butcher after secondary school. In 1970 he emigrated to Canada, where he carried out various activities and incidentally completed an evening school. He completed his studies in English at the University of British Columbia near Vancouver with a bachelor's degree. In 1975 he went to Honduras, where he worked in the capital Tegucigalpa until 1977 as an English teacher and first poems published in English and German. From 1977 to 1982 he studied at McGill University in Montréal and worked as a teacher at the local Goethe-Institut. Cow is his first novel.

What starts as a simple story of a Spanish guest worker arriving to work in a small Swiss dairy village. He works on the farm earning the respect of the farmer, Knuchel. The Knuchel treats him, Ambrosio, well and even buys new clothes for his worker. Ambrosio arrived in shorts and sandals and the clothes of the warmer Spanish climate. He earns the farmer's respect. Bolsch is the farmer's prize cow and has the run of the farm she is the queen in the matriarchy of cows. Ambrosia next finds himself in the slaughterhouse after seven years of hard work. Bolsch also finds herself in the same slaughterhouse.

Sterchi gives the reader a very detailed look into milk cows from milking to calving. The new textbook descriptions blending well with the story. Also, the reader will be introduced to the workings of the slaughterhouse as well as the men who wind up working there. The reader follows the animals from stunning, to draining the blood:

I open your throat, following the strands of neck muscle, cut you open as far as the gristly white of your windpipe I sever muscle from muscle, vessel from vessel.

Even the blood is saved by and adding a declotting agent. (It will be used in feed). A man removes the offal careful not to cut into the intestines and organs. A slip will ruin the meat. The reader will learn which vertebrae is separated on steers and cows when quartering the carcass. It is all part of the disassembly line. The slaughterhouse has no redeeming qualities to it. It is where the unuseful animals are sent and less desirable men work. It is a darkness that exists outside of the dairy village.

The farm represents a lighter place. Knuchel cares for his cows. He treats their wounds, fusses over their diet, and follows the politics of his heard. There is a positive connection between man and animal, even if the animal is clearly a servant of man and will one day wind up in the slaughterhouse. One day; but not today. The farm is life to the slaughterhouse's death.

The Cow is deeper than it appears. Ambrosio is clearly an outsider and treated rather poorly by everyone in the village except Knuchel. To drive the xenophobia home, the town itself is called Innerwald strictly translated it means a paused woodland. On the surface, it sounds like an inside place, introverted. There is a battle between Knuchel and the rest of the village over milking machines and artificial insemination. Knuchel opposes both. Ambrosio is hired as a milker instead of giving the job to machines. Knuchel tells the mayor when getting Bolsch inseminated by a bull that he couldn't drink the milk of an inseminated cow. There is something unclean and unnatural about the process. Cow is also a story of flaws. Ambrosio is flawed because he is an outsider and does not speak any German. He is essentially run out of town. Even in the slaughterhouse, we are reminded that he is flawed by his losing a finger. Bolsch is also flawed despite her greatness and standing; she does not produce a useful cow. In seven attempts it is always a useless male calf. She, for all her greatness, will not produce a prize milk cow.

More than simply a novel Cow is literature. It contains far more than entertainment. It teaches and instructs the reader. The violence of the slaughterhouse is used to reinforce the other messages in the book. This is not an easy book to put down or to forget.



The forward is written by the translator Michael Hoffmann and the introduction is by Eileen Battersby. Available February 8, 2018. ( )

In the early 1960s, a Spanish labourer called Ambrosio arrives in rural Switzerland to work on a cattle farm. Living with the farmer's family, he becomes intimately acquainted with their animals including their pride and joy, the head milk-cow Blösch.

Seven years later, now working relentless shifts in a city slaughterhouse, Ambrosio recognises an older, emaciated Blösch as she is pushed through the abattoir door to be shot, bled and chopped up for sausage-meat.

This is the basic contrast at the heart of this book – an important book, I think, and one which has only become more relevant and powerful since it was first published in the 80s. Sterchi's subject is not just our attitude to animals, but also industrialisation itself and the nature of our behaviour towards each other, themes which are evoked through a brilliant mixture of pastoral lyricism, dense paragraphs of Joycean, intercut conversation, and sparse industrial narration.

Sterchi's descriptions of Swiss village life are spot-on – he builds up a cast of gentle, kindly characters who, however, also exhibit an underlying communal xenophobia. It means that life for Ambrosio is always a negotiation, though one often marked by beauty, as in his first impressions of the village:

the scale and proportions of barns and outbuildings silhouetted in the night, trees and bushes, the contours of the land and the hush up above, everything etched itself into his mind, in colours and forms he barely noticed for themselves, in melodies and shadings. Months later, he could still remember exactly how the first, the second, the third apple tree by the track had smelled, of resinous buds, and the exact blue-grey glint of the fenceposts.

Chapters of this kind of thing – told from a genial third-person perspective – alternate with chapters in ‘the city’ (probably Bern), which are mostly narrated in a dazed, clipped first-person narrative from an unnamed apprentice at the slaughterhouse.

Piccolo slits the cows' bellies open, pulls out the guts and makes a bit of room inside. Then he saws through aitchbone and sternum.…

I'm already cutting my seventh throat.

The loneliness of the headless bodies behind me, the hopeless gurgles ahead.

The guts, still digesting, bloat the stomachs round as cannonballs. A thin whoosh of air, and I smell the pressure released through the relaxed sphincter.

Bony beside every body, the appropriate peeled skull, with empty eye sockets.

The effect of these juxtapositions can be quite dramatic. On the farm, the cows are individuals; we learn their names, their personalities; they are still all milked by hand, because the farmer ‘just couldn't conceive of his cows being fed into a network of pipes and valves and pumps’. At the abattoir, they have no names; they are kicked and sworn at; they are reduced to anatomies and fed into a grotesque conveyor belt of death and dismemberment.

It's important to understand that Sterchi's point is not that one picture is Good and the other Bad. His point is that one depends on the other: that the world of the farmyard, which everyone knows about, is built on the world of the slaughterhouse, which everyone pretends not to know about. The traditional, cosy image of Swiss rural life, of cowbells clunking over Alpine pastures, is one that depends for its existence on a second, hidden world of piss and shit and blood and exploited immigrant labour.

This is a particularly strong message from a Swiss author in a Swiss setting, since Switzerland has spun its identity around the image of a nativist agricultural idyll – but of course it's relevant anywhere cows are ‘forced by butter mountains and excess milk production into state-subsidized slaughtering programmes’. You can see why fans of this book reach for some lofty comparisons: Moby-Dick comes up a lot, which is not really about a whale in the same way that this is not really about a cow.

Michael Hofmann's translation of Blösch was first published in the late 1980s and promptly sank without trace, despite his recommendation to the publisher that the original was likely to be the best German-language book for a decade. This 2018 reissue, now unambitiously retitled Cow, should be hailed from the rooftops. ‘It's the book that made me a translator,’ Hofmann says in his foreword (though I'm sure he's previously said the same thing about the works of Joseph Roth). I go back and forth on what I think of Hofmann, but here, although he struggles with some of the slangy conversational scenes in the slaughterhouse, the rural sections are handled with exquisite sensitivity, and he wields a ruthlessly exact vocabulary in the descriptions of cutting animals to pieces.

Such descriptions are many and detailed, and have a stomach-churning cumulative quality that starts to make you feel trapped in a Dantesque nightmare – except that it's determinedly factual. Sterchi's father was a butcher, and he apparently followed him into the trade for a few years, so there is a terrifying sense of verisimilitude to this stuff – by the end of the book, you feel you could practically take a cow apart yourself.

In its final chapters, Cow builds to a hallucinatory scene of rebellion and revolution (somewhat reminiscent of the final scenes of Lindsay Anderson's If…), and here Sterchi's prose finds yet another mode – that of historic irony.

The cow stood and bled, and it was as though she knew the long history of her kind, as though she knew that she was one of those mothers cheated of their rich white milk, who had offered their teats for thousands of years, and for thousands of years been devoured in recompense. It was as though she knew that her kind had always had to beat their hooves sore on the stoniest of fields, that for her kind there was no escaping the leather harness of the plough that kept this world alive. It was as though this cow knew about her ancestors, understood that she herself could only be a pale reflection of the mighty aurochs, who with his curved, arm-length horns had established a dominion that stretched from the bright woods and rich parkland of central Europe as far as the distant heart of China, an empire on which the sun seldom set, and that neither the treacherous Asian yak nor the sullen gaur had been able to take away from him.

I stopped eating animals a couple of years ago now – and having moved to the Swiss countryside last year, right next door to a family cattle farm, this book would certainly have finished me off if I hadn't already decided. At the same time, it's only fair to warn potential readers that although I highly recommend it, it isn't the kind of book you look forward to curling up in bed with at the end of a hard day. In various ways it can be challenging. But if you like fiction that tackles big, modern themes in innovative ways, then this feels like a novel whose time has come. ( )

De roman handelt over het leven en de ondergang van een koe. Tevens is het het levensverhaal van Ambrosio, een Spaanse gastarbeider in Zwitzerland, die Blösch eerst als boerenknecht heeft verzorgd en liefgehad en haar zeven jaar later uitgemergeld tegenkomt in een slachthuis.
De roman sloeg in als een bom:de Zwitserse idylle verwordt tot haar dantesk tegendel, van welvarend land tot pathologische diskrimatie van de vreemdeling. Gedenk het minarettenreferendum!