Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses

Paperback, 224 pages

English language

Published Nov. 12, 2020 by Pushkin Press, Limited.

ISBN:: 978-1-78227-620-3

A society where cannibalism has been legalized because of an animal Virus, leaves the butcher Marcos struggling with his morality and role in this new society.

6 editions

GildedGrouse reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Unsubtle Allegory, Surprising What Stings

4 stars

I really whipped through this one. I'm perhaps a little too into cannibal media and familiar with people-as-livestock ideas. So, much of the book was shocking to see in mainstream print, but not terribly shocking in itself. Whatever shock there is wears of pretty fast, honestly. Nearly every scene with a new character is a nearly 1:1 satire of a specific form of exploitation in real life. So while it is really ham-fisted in that sense, I enjoy it and think it is worth thinking about. Certainly gives one some rhetorical ammo, I suppose. The final little morality play involving shipping is the most cutting in the book.

The more deeply unsettling things in the book were, for me, not remotely related to bashing humans over the head and carving them up for supper. The domesticity in the book is more chilling than anything violent or sexual, and brings up more interesting questions than the 1:1 allegories. It's easy to reduce the domestic playacting as a personal defeat of Marcos trust in humanity. It's more interesting to imagine it as more consequential. The most unique idea in the book, and the one that ached the hardest wasn't about humans at all (and no, it's not about THAT scene at the zoo either). The simple erasure of animals not just as pets and livestock, but even as children's toys haunts me far more than anything else in the work.

I do have some minor criticisms about the worldbuilding, there are a few things about "the stock" that are not really consistent. Perhaps this is dissonance between Marcos beliefs and observed reality, but I think there are just slightly sloppy writing.

JonathanHDavis reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Kind of a mess

2 stars

The writing itself is incredible. It makes you squeamish and never overstays a plot point. The problem is that the story has become so unbelievable that it's impossible to think of this as a pilot involving humans. Everyone acts completely unnatural all of the time. It's not Earth suffering from a disease and addiction to meat. It's just somewhere else with a different species. In short, the great writing and squeamishness carries a ridiculous plot that lacks humanity, in a far more literal sense than the authors' intended.

Jim Brown reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

"euphamisms that nullified the horror"

No rating

The most interesting thing about this book is it's treatment of the ways language can direct attention away from horrific behavior. Cannibalism becomes normal once a society develops an entire vocabulary around it.

This book was a tough read in terms of the gore, and I didn't necessarily love the ending or some of the narrative choices. I would be interested to know how it reads in the original Spanish

ihate2grade reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

None

5 stars

This is a deeply disturbing book. I found the subject matter absolutely appalling yet I was captivated by the entire book.

Yes is is a bit graphic but not as much as it could be..

And the ending was so ..... I will let you figure that at..

So many moral lessons in this book... Very Well done..

🥒 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.

--- spoiler ----

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. :')

eddubu reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

i started reading again because of this book.

5 stars

I needed something to get me interested in reading again. this book did it with its dark subject matter and commentary on consumerism.

nex3 reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

None

2 stars

Intensely upsetting on a lot of axes. What hits me most is the creeping realization that Marcos doesn't feel alienated from the horrendous society around him because of its immense cruelty and massive slavery/murder industry, but because his own life has been shitty and he's sublimating that alienation into a hatred and distrust of the world. His self-justification to continue working as second-in-command at the murder factory is never convincing, but once he starts raping a slave of his own it becomes clear where his priorities lie—and that the reader has nowhere in the novel to flee.

The only character with any moral backbone is the father, implication painting the only plausible act of resistance as going mad. This starts to get at what I don't like about the novel: its resounding pessimism, its implicit but iron conviction that the world would simply fall in line. And to be fair, I come at this with the benefit of hindsight. This is a pre-COVID novel, but I now live in a world where consensus reality pushes towards denialist behavior that is in fact deeply evil. And it's not like this. There's no forbidden words, just people who don't care to listen. There's no grand conspiracy, just a series of convenient decisions. And there are also plenty of people who defy that denialism and work to make everyone's lives better.

I am profoundly curious whether Augustina Bazterrica still wears a mask.

ArouraLeona reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

None

5 stars

Very VERY hard read but SO well written and captivating. Absolutely grippingly captures the horrifically human experience of how we survive through crisis even if our survival is at the expense of others. Maybe even especially so.

Edit: <spoiler>Read a few other comments and came across one about how the non Argentinian characters were from Axis countries and that had me rethinking a lot of the book. I thought about it as a generic, "this is the horrific stuff people will do to other people" idea... Suddenly I remembered it was written by an Argentinian and that there is a culture potentially connected there... I am probably reading too much into it, but yeah. Reading it in English and being in farm country myself, I kept thinking about this taking place at the ranch next door, which it COULD, but also... some of it would be dif erent if that was the case... Just made me think a little more about it is all.</spoiler>

Also, the puppy part isn't unnecessary, it's very important. It shows how much more they impact him than the actual people he helps kill every day. It shows how much more they impact you than the actual people you've gotten used to reading about dying so far. How eay it is for that to have been normalized.

snettie reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Brutal for the sake of being brutal

3 stars

This book made me feel disgusted in a way that a book has never made me feel. It was really fascinating, and upsetting, and I'm glad it's over. I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre, so perhaps it wasn't for me. But, as brutal as this book was, and how clearly allegorical it was, it surprisingly did not have a lot to say beyond "imagine what it would be like if we had industrialized meat but made from humans". Maybe it did say something more than that (it did seem to touch on the topic of how we so easily can dehumanize others), but I didn't grasp it. ANYWAY, it was okay, thanks TikTok for the recommendation.

gnu reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Tender? I hardly know her

4 stars

I counted three times during this quick read my jaw dropped because something was just so revolting to think about past the words on the page. Comfortably uncomfortable throughout with impressive meaning to derive and think about long after the last page. Content warning for those who aren't usually into horror lit like myself

tulkas reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Short and Tender

3 stars

This book is short. I think that is a good thing. What the book has to is interesting and valuable to think about but it says one thing well and even though the book was short it started to feel long. I was very happy that I finished the book and didn't set it down. I think this would be a good book club book ( with the right people ) or just a book to talk about -- the discussion of the book was better than the book , to me.

Simon Vandereecken ~ Nithou reviewed Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Gripping and frightening

5 stars

Following the spread of a virus that makes animal meat deahtly to humans, society turns to produce "special meat", humans engineered to be eaten. Tender is the Flesh takes you to the frightening daily life of the "meat hunter" of a processing plant, charged with contracts, meat quality etc. The story starts slow but becomes more and more frightening as the pages go and you're unable to let it go until the very end. It left me a deep mark and brought me quite a lot of things to think about.