TENDER IS THE FLESH / AGUSTINA BAZTERRICA

 

At the library, we're starting a new adult book club, called the High Strangeness book club. The first book we're reading is Tender Is The Flesh by Agustino Bazterrica. It's quite a remarkable book, well-made but definitely hard to read, to stomach (pardon the pub). It's a dystopian horror novel about socially-normalized cannibalism, and what that would look like and how it would feel.

In it, we follow Marcos Trejo, the son of a processed meat manufacturer, who now sells "special meat" up and down the industrial food-chain (pun intended). He does this to pay for his father's nursing home care, is estranged from his wife after the death of their infant son, etc. The "special meat" he purveys is the product of human beings cultivated and raised for slaughter. But always throughout, there runs the theme of the illicit thrill of killing and eating "meat with a first and last name" -- i.e., so-called ordinary people. We see the plant where they slaughter people, the human deli in the city, the hunting preserve where they hunt what elsewhere has been called "the most dangerous game," the research lab where Mengele-type experiments are conducted on human subjects, etc. The story turns when Marcos is gifted a prime female subject as a gift / bribe. The theme of all this has to do with our ability, through euphemism and language, to de-humanize the Other and the consequences to Them and to Us that necessarily brings.

Grade: This is a tough one. I can't say that I love it yet. But I do more than like it. It's a hard book that makes me think and that I find very haunting. For right now, I'm going to give a B+.

Revised Opinion: I can't seem to get this book out of my mind in terms of its content and artistry. Based on the fact, I need to elevate it to a grade of at least a solid A.

Postscript: I just recently realized that I had accidentally mis-gendered the author. That has now been corrected.