Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by inkdrinkerreads
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
4.0
Yuck.
I’m aware that my reviews are ‘TL;DR’ for most so if you can’t be bothered to proceed, the above perfectly summarises my feelings about this Argentinian dystopian-horror.
It is disgusting.
I am so very glad that I am already a vegetarian as I don’t think I could so much as glance at a sausage after this read. In a future where a virus (yep, one of those again) has killed off all animals, humanity decides that a spot of cannibalism’s actually alright after all!
We follow Marcos, who runs a factory that raises and slaughters humans for meat and is intimately involved in every stage of production. On one level, the book is a shocking polemic against the meat industry and the most nauseating, repulsive, upsetting thing about the story is not that fictional humans are being fictionally eaten, but that this barbarism and cruelty happens all over the world to ensure we get our tasty burgers. The brutality of this novel is in exposing our desensitisation to the industrial murder of our fellow creatures.
As much as Bazterrica is critiquing carnivorousness here, this novel is more an exploration of the alluring power of euphemism- our ability to construct worlds with words and to render the unspeakable speakable. When the author talks about language, he does so with striking metaphor and poetry and, yet, the rest of the novel is told in stark, declarative prose, harshly sterile as it details the dissection and consumption of human bodies. Language is inadequate at confronting the horrors in this novel, just as it so often is in our real world.
The world Bazterrica creates is as haunting and eerie as it is outright grotesque and blood-spattered. Since the animals died out, “there’s been a silence that nobody hears” and an empty zoo becomes a key location for the muted protagonist. He forlornly wanders the aviaries grieving over his dead son, reminiscing about happier times with a father he is losing to dementia and contemplating what to do about the woman he is illegally keeping at home.
This is not for the faint of heart and I would say that if you’re planning on eating steak any time soon, you may wish to give this one a miss. It will stay with me for a long, long time.
I’m aware that my reviews are ‘TL;DR’ for most so if you can’t be bothered to proceed, the above perfectly summarises my feelings about this Argentinian dystopian-horror.
It is disgusting.
I am so very glad that I am already a vegetarian as I don’t think I could so much as glance at a sausage after this read. In a future where a virus (yep, one of those again) has killed off all animals, humanity decides that a spot of cannibalism’s actually alright after all!
We follow Marcos, who runs a factory that raises and slaughters humans for meat and is intimately involved in every stage of production. On one level, the book is a shocking polemic against the meat industry and the most nauseating, repulsive, upsetting thing about the story is not that fictional humans are being fictionally eaten, but that this barbarism and cruelty happens all over the world to ensure we get our tasty burgers. The brutality of this novel is in exposing our desensitisation to the industrial murder of our fellow creatures.
As much as Bazterrica is critiquing carnivorousness here, this novel is more an exploration of the alluring power of euphemism- our ability to construct worlds with words and to render the unspeakable speakable. When the author talks about language, he does so with striking metaphor and poetry and, yet, the rest of the novel is told in stark, declarative prose, harshly sterile as it details the dissection and consumption of human bodies. Language is inadequate at confronting the horrors in this novel, just as it so often is in our real world.
The world Bazterrica creates is as haunting and eerie as it is outright grotesque and blood-spattered. Since the animals died out, “there’s been a silence that nobody hears” and an empty zoo becomes a key location for the muted protagonist. He forlornly wanders the aviaries grieving over his dead son, reminiscing about happier times with a father he is losing to dementia and contemplating what to do about the woman he is illegally keeping at home.
This is not for the faint of heart and I would say that if you’re planning on eating steak any time soon, you may wish to give this one a miss. It will stay with me for a long, long time.