Review by bklassen - Tender Is the Flesh

bklassen 's review for:

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

4.0

dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I would really not recommend this book to anyone with a sensitive stomach. I especially would not recommend eating while reading this book.

Tender is the Flesh is a fascinating, if not horribly morbid, take on the world if the world was suddenly not allowed to eat animal meat anymore. This dystopian world has been hit by a virus that affects all animals and causes anyone or anything that consumes said meat to become violently ill. Think bird flu on a much, much, much larger scale.

You might think that we would then be escalated to become a plant based society and turn to soy and veggie based alternatives, but this is satire (I think), and thus the world has instead turned to cannibalism instead of eschewing meat altogether. However, in order to dispel that pesky cognitive dissonance, the remaining population simply calls it “special meat” and comes up with other synonyms and euphemisms to get around the fact that humans have taken to eating humans instead of dropping meat.

Disturbing is certainly the word to use for this story, especially when you find yourself a little desensitized to the subject matter after some time because the alternative is to contemplate the horrors of a society that has turned to a horrific act and made no big deal out of it. It is simply how things are now.

There are two things that stood out most to me during this book (besides multiple scenes that actually turned my stomach and made me feel a little sick).

The first is the depth that Bazterrica put into the world and its characters. It feels like she thought of every single facet of this alternate future in how people have reacted, including wiping out all animals, the processing of human flesh, the conspiracy theories, the people’s reactions, the classicism, and more. It feels so fleshed out (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself) that it fees real.

The second was the dichotomy of the writing styles. At times, the prose was bare, like a Hemingway novel. It gave facts and character reactions and story beats in a very matter-of-fact way, much in the way that people no longer bat an eye at cannibalism. Then, at times, the writing takes on a beautiful, almost surreal, nature, full of adjectives and similes and metaphors. I took the time to highlight a few of my favorites, which is something I should do more often but don’t often do.

“His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.”

“He knows he doesn’t have to say anything to this man, just agree, but there are words that strike at his brain, accumulate, cause damage. He wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism to Señor Urami. He wishes these words could rip open the man’s smile, perforate the regulated silence, compress the air until it chokes both of them.”

“He intuited without being certain that his father’s words were about to break, that they were held together by the thinnest of transparent threads.”

“Cecilia’s words became black holes, they began to disappear into themselves.”

“Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.”

Like I said, this book is disturbing, grotesque, morbid, at times vile, and horrific. However, I think it’s a good criticism of our world and dependence on meat, as well as our ability to turn to disgusting acts and change our world views/behavior to accommodate for a convenience, or at least the resistance to change.

Content Warnings