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For years Maria da Penha was mistreated by her husband, after all he inflicted such serious injuries in an attempted murder that she will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
A life that she devotes to the fight for justice, in her case and in the case of all women who are victims of men in Brazil.
Partly with success: since 2006 there has been a law named after her that punishes violence against women more severely.
But there is no end to mistreatment and murders: every seven hours a woman is murdered in Brazil because of her gender, the »Weltspiegel« reported last year;
The daily newspaper “O Globo” described violence against women as an “epidemic” in 2019;
The most dangerous place for women is their own four walls, said Brazil’s women's rights activist Floresmar Ferreira.
“I'm not saying the Maria de Penha law against domestic violence is bad.
But it doesn't solve the problem, ”says Patricia Melos,“ Stacked Women ”.
After the rather satirical crime thriller »Trügerisches Licht« and the psychological thriller »The Neighbor«, the new novel by the Brazilian, who has already won the German Crime Prize twice and lives in Switzerland, tells of systematic misogyny, of a spiral of violence that all too often ends with murder.
The usual brash-sarcastic tone of voice in which Melo points out social grievances and which is one of her great strengths can also be found here in part, but in view of the subject it is increasingly lost.
On the one hand, »Stacked Women« has become an angry, accusing book, sometimes almost unbearable in its portrayal of male violence, but it also has another, a fantastically mythical dimension.
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Author Melo
Photo: Horst Galuschka / picture alliance / dpa
The story unfolds on three levels, in alternating chapters.
In the sections numbered from A to X, we learn what happens to a young lawyer from São Paulo - Melo doesn't give her narrator a name and thus gives her a more universal character - who travels to the western Brazilian province of Acre on behalf of her law firm to get away from there Report trials of men who have committed violence to women.
She notes all these cases in a notebook, the notebook of the stacked women, as she calls the victims.
Excerpts from it form the second reading level of the novel, marked with numbers, in which it records how the victims were killed: the wives, lovers, ex-girlfriends, mothers, children, babies.
Precisely in their objectivity, these twelve ultra-short chapters develop a similar emotional impact as the epic fourth part of Roberto Bolaño's horror panorama "2666", in which the writer told of the femicide in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez.
Hunting men while intoxicated
The case that most upsets Melos' protagonist is the rape, torture and murder of 14-year-old Txupira, an indigenous girl, by three white boys from so-called best families.
After a process manipulated by bribery, the trio is released, and at the latest now, when numbers and statistics have become fates, Melos heroine decides to no longer just be an observer, but to become active herself.
But Melo also shows her powerlessness within a system that invites men to misogyny, even educates them: »Nothing is easier to learn than misogyny.
There is no shortage of teachers.
The father shows us how.
The state is showing the way.
The legal system shows us how.
The market.
The culture.
The advertising."
The young lawyer develops revenge fantasies, which are increasingly manifesting in the hallucinations she has during her regular ayahuasca rituals in an indigenous village - the third narrative level, marked by Greek letters.
The line between reality and dream is becoming increasingly blurred, and in a state of intoxication, Melos' narrator sees herself as an Amazon hunting men with other women.
These fantasies become more and more brutal and absurd, at some point even a flying vagina becomes a weapon, "an even more deadly version of the vagina dentata," says a warrior in a dream, referring to a myth that Sigmund Freud once short-circuited with male castration fear.
The archaic revenge scenarios are vivid and drastic, and while reading you can feel how much Melos' protagonist needs these images in order to process a reality that is unbearable for her, as for many other women.
"I am unable to forgive," she will say at some point.
"Forgiveness is tamed vengeance." And then dead men lie on the streets of Acre.
Has she become a male-murdering Amazon?
Or are other forces at work here?
Much of this novel is as terrifying as it is impressive.
Melo's brilliance lies in the thrift with which she uses her narrative means.
She only needs 250 pages to design not only the three levels already mentioned, but also to weave in a personal abuse story from the life of the nameless heroine, which begins with a slap and increasingly escalates, as well as a description of the misery in which the indigenous peoples of Brazil - the rightful owners of the land - are forced to live today: "They are not invisible, they do not exist," it once said.
However, Melo does not make the mistake of sketching a stereotypical image of "noble savages": Machsimo rules among them too, women are viewed as the property of the man.
"You can say," says the narrator, "that feminicide is a cross-class crime."
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