A review by keegan_leech
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

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

3.75

Tough to talk about this one without really digging into the ending so spoiler tags ahead. Generally though, an excellent exploration of how societal systems can alienate and dehumanise not just the most obvious victims of those systems, but all who participate in them. A moral erosion that undermines all it touches and which feels (and partially because of this, becomes) inescapable to those within trapped within it. Often a difficult read, and I was glad that Bazterrica avoided didacticism in favour of treating her themes with complexity and nuance.

There are a couple of weaker spots. It is always difficult to judge this kind of thing in translation, but the prose often felt awkward, and occasional elements of the plot just felt out of place. I don't want to judge them harshly, it's certainly possible that through a different lens I would've liked them better, but I am uncertain about elements like the
creepy twin children with a shared secret language
or the
wealthy and ageless Romanian human-hunter who drinks from a red goblet and whose ornate study is conspicuously without sunlight
. They just stuck out as much more camp than the rest of the otherwise very sombre and straight-faced writing. Sure, maybe they shouldn't feel out-of-place in a novel about systematised cannibalism, and I don't necessarily think they're thematically inappropriate, but defter writing might have made them feel more natural. Also, the implication that "the government and media" have secretly manufactured a global health emergency as a cover for some authoritarian conspiracy well... after the covid pandemic it just seems kind of stupid. The book was written in 2017, so I don't think Bazterrica is some kind of "plandemic" conspiracy theorist. But an actual pandemic showed the powerful and privileged to be far more incompetent and self-interested than ruthlessly conspiratorial. Absurd theories that the covid pandemic was manufactured, rather than being some kind of dangerous truth suppressed by authoritarian overlords, only granted more leeway to a disinterested system that failed to protect the most vulnerable in society. By comparison, Bazterrica's manufactured health panic seems like shallow cartoon villainy.

Then there's the ending. Whatever the novel's flaws, I think the ending tied an absolutely perfect bow on the whole thing. An effective twist ending reframes all that came before it, and to do so well is an impressive achievement. In this case,
killing Jasmine—the woman he's seemingly been treating with greater and greater  humanity until this point—reframes Marcos' motivations  in a way that only strengthens the themes of the novel. After all this, he still sees her as inhuman and disposable? Well of course! For months he has raped her and treated her as a human pet, unconsenting surrogate, and replacement wife. Even if he treats her better than many others would, he has not been treating her as a person. No matter his reservations about it, Marcos is still a willful participant in a system which treats humans as livestock, and he has come to see this system as the norm.

In the penultimate chapter Marcos suggests a plan to poison the scavengers who take discarded corpses from the processing plant, and I found myself thinking with some fascination: "However his behaviour might have changed, he's still calculating and capable of incredible callousness." With hindsight, it's obvious that this isn't a defensive tactic or an example of some moral blind spot. This is who Marcos has always been. The people who make the system run smoothly (people like Marcos and Sergio the stunner) are not psychopaths or villains. They're practical ordinary people who don't relish their work, but do it anyway. So what is the value of the revulsion that Marcos does feel, or the small ways in which he does refuse to participate in this system? It is surely not meaningless that he is kind to puppies and avoids eating meat. To what extent is that undone by his continued treatment of other people as disposable property?
I like that Bazterrica doesn't offer an answer to these questions. These conflicts are presented and explored in great depth and with a real clarity of purpose. But the reader isn't lead to any obvious answers. I'm certainly going to be mulling over the implications of the novel for a long time.
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