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A review by pushingdessy
Cadáver exquisito by Agustina Bazterrica
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Animal cruelty, Death, Blood, Body horror, Rape, Cannibalism, Xenophobia, Gore, Child death, and Classism