Book Review: Tender is the Flesh
Review by Dominic Howarth
I’m an omnivore at heart. I was raised on chicken parmesan, fish sticks, crunchy broccoli, hearty heads of romaine lettuce. I would eat anything. I had a voracious appetite.
I was also raised on horror. First, it was Goosebumps by R.L. Stine. Then I graduated to the harder stuff, like Clive Barker. I bobbed and weaved with different American authors, mostly male. Mostly white. I felt like I was reading the same stuff, over and over, and over again. I moved away from the genre entirely, focused on magical realism and nonfiction for a while.
Then, South America brought me back.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses) takes us into the heart of darkness and asks us which valve we would want on our plate. Hailing from Argentina, Agustina brings us into a world where a terrible disease has tainted all animal meat, removing it from the food chain. In place of that, humanity has decided to keep producing meat all the same, with people instead of cattle. Note, they now call it ‘special meat’, not ‘human meat’. They are not ‘people’, they are ‘the head’. They are not the first humans to be caged and sold and bred, they are ‘F.G.P’, or, ‘First Generation Pure’.
And Marcos is very good at what he does. He deals with ‘the head’, making sure the ‘special meat’ truly is pure, that the processes in place or done in as swift a manner as possible. In this cold and lifeless environment, we are slammed into the stainless steel whisper of the environment by Agustina’s taciturn and procedural prose. We see Marcos go about his day, and we are introduced to horror after horror, that for the sake of this blog I will not go into and will save for when you pick up the book yourself. Agustina knows when to turn away and when to push us into the blade of the buzzsaw. It’s visceral, and it stains.
If you want intense world-building, you won’t find it here. She doesn’t get us bogged down in too many of the hows and whys, just enough to understand that people will do what they need to do to get what they want, no matter how terrible it may be.
While originally written as a case against the general meat industry (and a scorching one at that), I can’t help but think about how this book holds up in a post-pandemic world. If I had read this book in 2019, I would have probably enjoyed it, but I would have looked at the idea of a world that could so quickly turn it’s back on so many people, for such an insane notion of bacon in the morning, and scoff. But, eventually, America will have to come to grips with how (at the time of this writing) we allowed 600k Americans to die, and we will have to come to terms with that. How, in our own way, we gave up a social good for an individualized need. Because we needed bacon in the morning.
I’m still an omnivore at heart. I eat a little more veggies now.
If You Liked This I Would Recommend:
‘Things We Lost In The Fire’ by Mariana Enríquez
‘Hurricane Season’ by Fernanda Melchor
‘Little Eyes’ by Samantha Schweblin
Best Enjoyed With: Something light!
Best Enjoyed When: You are nowhere near raw meat.
THE BOOK:
Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses (Translated by), $16
