🥒 reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Exquisite Indeed!!!
4 stars
Content warning due to the nature of the book, well, expect some mentions of gore, violence, assault ! :^) also some spoilers near the end
The only reason this has four stars is because I think it may be too gory for me. For real I had to sleep with the lights on for two days after I finished, no, devoured it in a single sitting.
For context, I read this shortly after I finished a couple history books on the very real and very horrific human experiments performed first by Japan, then Russia, then the US, before, during, and after WWII so not only was gore already on my mind, I don't think of myself as too squeamish when it comes to reading horror compared to watching it. Under my belt, I've also read a number of nonfiction treatises about unethical human experimentation on radiation, read, watched, and enjoyed all of Game of Thrones, and I survived reading American Psycho. As a point of comparison, I'd say American Psycho is only slightly gorier than Tender due to the callousness with which Patrick tortures and kills his victims while here the mass-genocide is described in detail in a clinical, efficient manner. The phrase, from American Psycho, 'I had two vaginas in my gym locker.' haunts me. Anyways. Suffice it to say that one should be well prepared when one cracks open this bad boy. After American Psycho, it is definitely the goriest read I've encountered. And after all my research into the horrors of unethical experimentation, there's nothing that feels too unrealistic or over-the-top to me, the ethical and political consequences of legal, mass-produced cannibalism looks fairly plausible to my cynical eye (assuming that first hurdle of persuading everybody to go along with mass-cannibalism were actually achieved lmao) though I certainly agree it's too gory for a majority of people.
Like its characters, the story is short and efficient: within the first few pages, our premise is out of the way and out in the open, leaving room for the complex, ethical quandaries from our narrator. Reading the English translation, I thought the prose was unique and captivating. The author certainly puts a lot of effort into describing the manner in which every character speaks. The ending comes at you like a slap in the face or a gush of cold water. It sneaks up on you but it doesn't feel out of place. Indeed, you should've seen this coming the whole time and you're a little mad at yourself that you didn't, clever author.
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This book is an ingenious use of unreliable narrator because from the very beginning, Marcos feels like a sympathetic character who's more honest and self-aware than everyone around him, not to mention the added pity points he gets for the tragedy of his dead baby. The reveal that Marcos is not only a willing cog in the machine who refuses to go against the system but he stoops low enough to repeatedly abuse his authority: he lies, he traps, he rapes, and he kills. Up until the very end, we expect Marcos to maintain at least some level of moral superiority because in comparison, everyone around him is so much worse, like the man who keeps his sex slave in a coffin under his bed or his sister who keeps her victim alive in a freezer to ensure the freshest cuts, but his own darker side is hinted at throughout the book, like the way he treats his father, and particularly when he cannot fully allow himself to believe that Jasmine is capable of agency and thought. He knows the euphemisms and the elaborate legal structure are just theatre; a pretext that makes exploitation permissible but he wholeheartedly accepts it. It is this ultimate metaphor for many evils in the real-world that lingers in my mind. Bravo to Agustina Bazterrica for an intelligent and gripping masterpiece that scared the shit out of me. :')
