ABSTRACT
A carne, Julio Ribeiro's second novel, had a unanimous reception among the critics of the time it was published: it was considered obscene, silly, exaggerated, and criticized from all points of view. The object of this criticism ranged from the dedication of the novel to Emile Zola in the Introduction (in French), to the supreme fault of not being "national" or not "national enough". The only critic of the time the novel was published who was less mordant in his analysis was Araripe Junior, who says that Ribeiro, in A carne, "equipped by modern science, conscious of the excellence of Zola's method, tested his muscles and, following the line of his disposition, set himself far beyond the expected". It seems that the fifty years after Veríssimo and Romero's time were not enough to call the critics' attention to the fact that A carne is not reducible to the character Lenita.
