�y��vlog

“Hans has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the motion he has captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.”

On 91 occasions the cameras recorded a slaughterman shooting horses, not close up, but from a distance.

“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” is Iczkovits’s third novel, the first to be translated into English.

So begins the Israeli writer Yaniv Iczkovits’s novel “The Slaughterman’s Daughter,” a sprawling 19th-century tale filled with violence, ancillary subplots and historical tidbits.

Fluently translated by Orr Scharf, “The Slaughterman’s Daughter” exhibits some trappings of the picaresque novel, including a broad cast of supporting characters whose misadventures steer us away from the main narrative for a bit too long.