Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
A dystopian future where all animals are toxic to consume so we begin to breed, farm and eat humans.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Pros: layered equally in typical human experiences and horrific acts of brutality, touches on lot of current societal issues, well written, terrifying and heavy
Cons: I didn’t love the ending
TRIGGER WARNING: Violence, Cannibalism, Animal cruelty, Gore, Body horror, Sexual assault, Child death, Rape, Death of parent
I just finished this book and immediately opened my laptop to discuss it. I am distraught.
This book was one of my selections for Hannah and I to read, I don't regret it... but she may be pretty upset with me if she ever reads chapter 6, part 2. I am preparing for many, many texts but I did tell her to just go ahead and skip that section. It adds nothing to the story and would only upset her.
The story is a dystopian tale of a virus breaking out amongst the animals/livestock population worldwide and anyone who eats the contaminated meat, dies. So, naturally, the world corrected this by going vegan, THE END.
What they actually do is exterminate every animal in existence (aside from birds and bugs) and encourage everyone to switch over to a cannibal diet. Yes dears, they are eating people. The other other other white meat. YIKES.
There are breeding centers, slaughterhouses, experimental laboratories and tanning centers (and no, I do not mean like Tan N Go) in order to sustain enough meat to feed the population. People are bred, genetically modified and slaughtered so that other people can eat and survive. The audacity of it all.
There are undertones of government corruption, horrors of the meat industry that actually exists, nods to the pandering and fear mongering that goes on in a "civilized society" and so many other things woven into the overall story. The subtle uppercuts to very real, present day issues are what make this book different AKA better than something vapid and pointless like Season to Taste.
SPOILERS ALERT
In part 2, chapter 2, second paragraph, I got my first subtle hint at the layers to come. I read the sentence "His phone rings. He pulls over and answer the call." These 2 sentence say practically nothing, and still so many things. He cares about himself enough to pull over. He cares enough about the safety of other drivers to pull over. He cares enough about the person calling to not simply send it to voicemail. Obviously, he is a considerate human being right? What’s that…?Where was he driving to? Oh, just his JOB AT THE HUMAN SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
Marcos is relatable in a lot of ways. He is very matter of fact and detached in his position at the factory, meaning he must be good at his job, even though he has an internal dialogue that tells of his revulsion. He still does what needs to be done because what is the alternative? I feel like this is a big nod to capitalism as a whole. A crushing system that doesn't care about the worker, only what the worker can do for them. The workers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, participating in things they don't support, working for companies they don't believe in, day in and day out in order to just afford basic needs. It speaks on how big the human experience is and also how minimized it is by the society that we, ourselves, built.
Marcos is struggling with the loss of his infant child and the subsequent breakdown of his marriage. If that weren't enough, he is navigating the mental and physical decline of a parent when they reach old age. His father lives in a nursing home, which is paid for by Marcos’s slaughterhouse job. This... this was the most poignant piece of his story for me. I am currently dealing with losing my grandmother to Alzheimer's so I understand the loneliness that comes from sitting and talking to a person you love and having that person not know you anymore. It’s grief on top of grief. He also has a sister who is shallow, full of excuses and doesn't help at all with anything. He is lonely in almost every sense of the word.
I also wanted to spotlight on the weird bird fear that people in the city have. Everyone in the city uses an umbrella anytime they are outside because they fear the virus and the birds that may be carrying the virus. This felt like another jab at the hierarchy of society: city people tend to look down on more rural people as less intelligent, rougher around the edges, etc. and country folk tend to think that the city people are ridiculous and naive to the way the world around them. All of this felt very relevant in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic as well. It's strange because they seem to fear death so much and yet, death is all around them. I'm telling you y'all, this book is layered like a freaking genetically modified onion.
When Marcos gets gifted a human named Jasmine, my “Oh Shit” meter started losing its mind! This is the one time I kind of predicted the outcomes and didn't entirely hate that I was right. I figured he would start some sort of a relationship with her. I KNEW he would get her pregnant, I just felt it in my gut (pun intended). I had a fleeting thought towards the end that Cecilia would some how find out that Marcos was hiding Jasmine and the baby. I thought she may steal the baby or sabotage everything somehow. I had good ideas but I wasn't 100% on any of it.
Some of the more brutal aspects of the books came with no warning. I mean, the entire book is a warning to be honest, but every now and then, I'd read a line that just floored me. The fact that the pregnant females had their limbs amputated was particularly revolting. The removal of the vocal cords had me screaming just because I could. The laboratory in its entirety. All of those things stood out to me as beyond brutal and I would put the book down, have some water and dive back in.
The zoo. I loved and hated the zoo. I have spots in my life that are different, shadows of what they once were, that still hold a place in my heart and probably always will. Places that both hurt and soothe me when I visit. Places that remind me of the all that was and how far I've come in the meantime. The zoo, like the rest of the book, is layered in a full range of emotions.
The puppy scene in part 2 chapter 6, I was ready to fist fight those kids myself.
The niece and nephew...I hated them.
I was very glad that Marcos gave his sister an urn full of dirt.
The ending made me feel a lot of different things as well but mainly I closed the book feeling kind of empty. I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach because... he killed Jasmine. Essentially, the woman who made him feel alive again. He killed her because she is just an "animal" at the end of the day. She was a means to an end. All this time, I am reading about Marcos, his disdain for the people in the industry who seem to relish the killing, the hunters who literally stalk and kill humans for sport, the people who keep humans in their homes and eat pieces of them while they're still alive, the woman who is leading the way in human testing, not to mention his pain over the loss of his son, the rift with him and his wife, the ache of losing a parent. Then, with Jasmine, you get to see him care for her, nurture her, clean her, feed her, hold her, be patient with her and I'm reading all of these things feeling more and more like he may turn out to be a "good" person... and in the final page, all of it is stripped away and he is actually just another shitty person only out for himself.
This book was honestly a whirlwind, I have never read anything like it and I can’t wait until I stumble across something similar in the future. I would recommend this book to lovers of body horror and dystopian fiction and I’d amend that recommendation to also state that if you like animals, maybe avoid Part 2, Chapter 6.