Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

16 reviews

avereads12's review

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challenging dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
I thought the cannibalism was going to be the worst part. It was not.

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theochick's review

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challenging dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Fucked up in the best sense of the phrase with characters who make your skin crawl the entire way

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i_read_books_sometimes's review

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  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

A real disappointment. SA used for shock value, gratuitous horror that very quickly lost any emotional impact. I was very surprised that the author is a woman because all the female characters are only characterised by being sexual in a very dehumanising way -- which may have been the point of the book, but it felt demeaning rather than furthering the author's message. In other sections of the novel, the book hits the reader over the head repeatedly with its meaning. Phrases were repeated over and over, and the writing style was very dry. This may have been the translation, but with the plot being both boring and problematic, I still feel it's fair to give this book a low rating.

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twoesplease's review against another edition

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Author seemed to do no research into biology & nutrition. All animals are all infected by some disease that apparently does not affect humans (?) so humans are farmed for meat. Book quickly glosses over “vegetables don’t have complete proteins” (this has been figured out and compensated for by almost every traditional global culture by combining vegetables & grains for adequate nutrition). The straw that broke it for me was the wife of the main character (a nurse) saying she’s not “producing” enough eggs (in a flashback, before they had their first child, who died suddenly). Gory and torturous, but not thoughtful or researched.

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pushingdessy's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

A disturbing, graphically perverse dystopia about humanity gobbling up itself.

Babes this isn’t vegan propaganda. But if the possibility that it might be affects you so, maybe think why (and no, I’m not even a vegetarian).

Okay, hear me out. Obviously, the parallel between animal meat and human meat is intentional. The author has talked about how passing by a butcher’s gave her the idea for this story, and how researching and writing the book led her to becoming a vegan. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that the author is a fellow Argentinian: we’re a country known for its quality meat and high levels of meat consumption, where life without daily meat is inconceivable to many. That’s not the point, though.

The point is that dystopias play with the worst of human nature amped up to the max. That’s 1984. It’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s The Hunger Games. It’s Brave New World. And it’s Tender is the Flesh. Thinking that the only purpose of this book is to be vegan propaganda is a really basic reading of the story - a valid starting point, but you’re supposed to engage further without it being spoon-fed to you.

The story follows the POV of Marcos, a slaughterhouse supervisor after what is known as the Transition. It’s been over a decade since a deadly virus made all animals poisonous to humans - or at least, that was the official story. Eating human flesh is legal and normalized now, and humans raised in captivity have replaced animals in all other industries as well. Marcos' wife left him after they lost their child, but his life changes when he’s given a live, pure-bred specimen.

One of the features common to most dystopias, I think, is having this POV from a character the reader can relate to. They’re not one of the bad guys puppeteering the whole show, although they’re not necessarily one of the good guys either. They’re not a person who’s bought into the entire ideology. They might benefit from it, or they might be a victim, or they’ll be a victim at some point, but they’re sort of in the middle: living in this reality, not fighting it, but knowing that it’s not supposed to be like this.

In this story, Marcos works in a slaughterhouse because his father used to own one and that’s all Marcos learned to do by the time of the Transition. This is something that shows up through the novel: people who don’t necessarily want to kill or deal with this human livestock, but they don’t know how to do anything else… while others relish it a little too much.

Marcos is disgusted by it, he’s not an idiot. The new logic in this world is that the humans raised for consumption don’t have personhood: they’re referred to as “heads” like they’re cattle - because they are. People are not allowed to treat them as humans, and personal contact is forbidden. And yet the consumption of meat “with a last name” (humans who were actually people, who weren’t raised as cattle) is allowed in certain circumstances - you’re not ever really safe from ending up on someone’s table. The lines blur through the narration. Where’s the limit to who we can eat? So, Marcos doesn’t know what to do with this female head, but he knows he doesn’t want to kill her - he doesn’t eat “special meat”.

Marcos is also convinced that the virus was a lie, and other characters seem to think so as well, yet they don’t care. This book was written a few years before the COVID pandemic, and then goodness for that because this wouldn’t have landed well with me after three years of life-threatening conspiracies. But still, this is another common ingredient in dystopias: nothing of what’s happening needed to happen. So why did it?

The biggest takeaway from this book for me was that, dystopic as it is, it reflects something that already happens in real life: this denying some humans their personhood based on arbitrary things. Their race, their income, their gender, their sexuality. And how capitalism encourages this because then everyone is expendable, everyone can be a product. Humans eating humans is shown here in the most literal, horrific way - but humans already *eat* other humans in real life, and we naturalize it, even if it disgusts us. In this sense, I thought that the ending was really fitting and brings the moral of the story full-circle.

That’s why I think, if this book made you want to be a vegan or vegetarian, I mean, more power to you; what appears in the book is very much what we do to other species. Even if I don’t think that consuming animals is the same as consuming people and everyone should go vegan, I do think the current farming systems are shameful and that many abuses to animals still happen for the sake of our lifestyles. But primarily, I think it should make you think about how we currently treat other humans. 

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thebookpaiges's review

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dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75


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dholivero's review

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challenging dark reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

 In 200 pages, the author is able to construct a realistic dystopia where humanity no longer exists and leaves you questioning how you can keep your own.

In this world, a virus made animal consumption and interaction dangerous so governments replaced animals with marginalized peoples. The story follows Marcos, an executive at a slaughter house, who is both coping with the destruction of his family and the horror of the new world he is living in. 

Bazterrica introduces us to the players and stakeholders in human slaughter and skillfully leaves bread crumbs to instances in our own reality that made her horror possible. While the consumption of human flesh may be unimaginable to most (as it was to me), much of the horror she details in her novel warns what we can do and have done to each other. 

This is one of the best dystopian novels I have read in a long time. Simply focusing on the gore and criticism of the meat industry is failing to understand the full context of Bazterrica’s writing.

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arbramirez's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75


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smblanc1793's review

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dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

This book started very much in the vein of Fahrenheit 451 for me—the kind of book more concerned with its message than its story. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the descriptions were certainly vivid enough to keep me reading (and gagging) along, but I still think the characters, world, and narrative itself could’ve been built in a way that felt more expressive.

By the end, some of this faded a little—it became less preachy and more just…well…horrifying, but in the way I was eagerly anticipating. Still, though, overall I would have liked a little bit more story, a little bit more of our characters’ rich inner lives, and a little bit less of an thought experiment (albeit one written in a style beautifully, unbelievably grotesque).

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tonton2612's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book made me feel a certain kind of way. 

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