book review: Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

TRIGGER WARNING: VIOLENCE, GORE, BODY HORROR, ANIMAL CRUELTY, CHILD LOSS, SEXUAL ASSAULT, PRETTY MUCH ANY TRIGGER THERE COULD POSSIBLY BE, BEWARE.

blurb:

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

my review:

'Tender is the Flesh' by Augustina Bazterrica is a short, less than 200 pages, novel, that was fast paced and utterly brutal in the depictions of industrialized cannibalism that was instituted nationwide. Since reading this book, I've come to understand that it's a widely discussed book amongst the thriller genre community- I get it.

We, the readers, follow Marcos, a middle aged man who lived through 'the transition' where his government euthanized wild and domesticated animals alike, due to them suddenly becoming lethal to humans. Personally, I can't imagine surviving past that point because Finn and I are going to live long and happy lives together until we both expire in the same breath like the couple in "The Notebook." Anyways. Back to the book.

Marcos used to eat "special meat" (LITERALLY PEOPLE) up until the death of his young son, whom he and his wife, Cecilia, conceived via IVF. Cecilia doesn't produce viable eggs, and there is no chance of them reproducing naturally (fucking foreshadowing). There have been some other changes to Marco's life since his son's death approximately 8 months before we enter the scene, Cecilia has moved in with her mother, and Marcos has adopted this holier than thou attitude specifically in regards of his job and it's duties. But get this he runs a fucking meat packing plant. It was his father's job from before the transitio, and Marco had been raised slaughtering cattle. But now- Marcos oversees the farming, breeding, and butchering of humans who are considered food, and has been for years.

In this post modern cannibalistic era, edgy teens don't go vegan anymore, instead they spout sick shit like "the best meat has a first and last name." Security guards rape and murder 'the head' (because they are not to be referred to as humans. they aren't humans, they are a food product), breeding center's cut off the extremities of the birthing head because pregnant women will do anything to protect their unborn children from a life of being raised for slaughter (including self inflicted mutilation to insure miscarriages). The head do not speak, do not wear clothes, piss themselves when they are scared, and have no idea that they are any different from the animals we now consume.

This book is scary in the same way as "The Handmaids Tale" by Margaret Atwood is. It shows the reader that our lives are just a few people in office away from a complete dismantling of our values and laws.

The author is a vegan because I have to mention that, and she uses the seemingly abrupt disgust for cannibalism after Marco's son's death to lull readers into a false sense of security with our "protagonist-" I use that term so loosely here. For the first half of the book, you read Marco's supposed moral high ground surrounding the process of breeding, raising, and slaughtering people for food, but it's juxtaposed with him literally running a massive slaughter house. Throughout that first half of the book, you only see these silvers of nasty, fucked up Marcos, where he dehumanizes the head, and thinks some really fucked up violent shit.

After this establishment of Marcos, we follow him throughout his life within the cannibalism industry, from the leathering tannings after slaughter, the hiring of potential murderous psychopaths who come to the plant intent on enjoying the violence, and the religious groups surrendering members as "offerings" to the public wealth. It's all seriously fucked up shit, but the most fucked up stuff is yet to come.

The least of the fucked-up-ness is his affair with a local butcher- where she and him hook up on top of bloody human carcasses that she then intends to sell to her customers. Scratch that, it is one of the more fucked up parts. There were some truly DISGUSTING imagery of blood, cuts of meat, intertwined with fellatio and sex acts. It was beyond yucky and there were multiple passages that I blipped over because it felt unnecessary to torture myself.

When a vendor of "head" that supplies the slaughterhouse apologizes for a bad shipment (and by a bad shipment that means a cattle semi trunk packed with HUMANS some of which were DEAD and/or DYING) with what is essentially an organic grade human woman, Marcos tries to deny the gift. But soon enough, he washing her in the barn where he keeps her, and then rapes her. While there aren't any graphic scenes of rape, the implication is enough for me to be completely unwell.

Following this, we jump ahead in the timeline 8 months. We see Marcos, and the female head he's dubbed Jasmine. Jasmine is into her third trimester of pregnancy. She still cannot speak (did I mention they cut out their tongues?), but is allowed to live inside the house, albeit tethered to the bed with an incredibly long piece of rope. Marcos has more or less "house trained" her. It's here that we see Marcos struggle to maintain the demands of his job, the head auditors who definitely know something is up, and the returning frequency of his estranged wife's phone calls.

It all comes to a head (no pun intended) the day that Jasmine is giving birth to Marcos' child. Cecelia arrives during the birth, and Marcos tells her about the situation, as there are complications during labor and the child was at risk. Cecelia, a nurse, saves the child, but immediately takes him as her own. Leaving Jasmine desperately reaching for her child. It's then that Marcos clubs her in the head, a perfect replication of the meat rendering process at the packing plant, and brings her to the slaughterhouse to murder and dismember into cuts of meat.

The book ends with Marcos saying "She had the human look of a domesticated animal." ...

There are many instances where Marcos' act of disgust around the special meat industry falters and the readers can see his other side where he enthusiastically participates in some nasty shit (I am thinking about the butcher scenes- those were deeply unsettlingly. There are moments within his own mind where you can see he isn't any better than other participants in the system. But you can't help but hope that he's better than everyone else- Jasmine was the only real protagonist here, and she was so helpless your heart couldn't help but hurt for her.

Like I said before- it's like the narrator wanted to lull the audience into a false sense of security around Marco's morality. I felt I read the entire book just waiting for him show his true colors- which outside of glimpses was hidden until he raped Jasmine. He even talked about teaching Jasmine how to read one day (before anyone had caught onto him keeping her as a pet), which just makes me even more furious because what the fuck? I know she already has a consciousness but why would you think about teaching her how to be human if you always had the capacity to rip her life away from her without hesitation? I know that we were introduced to him as a human butcher, but man this one was tough to stomach. Sometimes I just wanted to scream at the characters for how selfish and wrong they were for so many reasons. Talk about people who shouldn't be parents- example a: Marcos and Cecelia.

I do want to touch on the fact that this book was originally written in Spanish, and was translated by Sarah Moses in 2020. I just have to give so many props to both the author and translator, while I don't speak or read Spanish and therefore have no capacity to compare both versions not only was there no grammatical/contextual confusion, but the lines were written beautifully with nuance and poetical resonance that I assumed Moses was careful to replicate from Bazterrica. I was incredibly impressed, and so was my co-worker Lauryn who read it at the same time I did.

Well, that wraps up my book review of "Tender is the Flesh" written by Augustina Bazterrica. Thank you all for reading and caring about what I have to say- it means the world to me that you have stuck along this far <3

Until the next post-