When Mariia Niskavaara went on holiday, she came back to find that her lettuces had run wild.
“They grew themselves long stems and started flowering, and good God they were gorgeous. I realized that if lettuces had their way, that’s how they’d grow. That summer, I couldn’t pick any more lettuce from my veg patch, so I bought them from the shop, because I felt that those ones were less alive. All of us want to grow and live wildly.”*
That desire to grow and live is strong in Ester the slaughterer. Most of all, she wants to create new life, to have a child. How can someone who kills animals for a living be so hungry for more life? And what happens to all that energy when it fails to bear fruit? Does her love go to seed, like Niskavaara’s holiday lettuces? There is something of a fairytale in here, and as other readers have said, much of the grotesque.
Ester works in the slaughterhouse of a meat factory, where her husband artificially inseminates the pigs. Her parents own a butcher’s shop. She’s grown up with the scent, texture, and taste of flesh. Reading, you can feel the cool worminess of fridge-cold raw mince between your fingers, taste the juices oozing from a perfect steak, and see the swirls of fat marbling a cold cut. I haven’t eaten meat for decades, but the text brings back good memories through the disgust. Niskavaara, too, is vegetarian; her portrayal is visceral and vivid.
Ester, teurastaja is published by Kosmos. Other extraordinary North European wordsmiths are on their list: Olga Ravn, Solvej Balle, and Ali Smith. Niskavaara, like Smith, is interested in the affects and effects of art. She’s doing a PhD on art that incorporates dead animals and plants in museum exhibition practices. That fed into this, her first novel. I hope it gets snapped up for translation soon, so you can read it.
*Mariia Niskavaara, cited in Susanna Laari’s story on her winning the Helsingin Sanomat first novel award (my translation), 14.11.2025
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
Leave a comment