He leaves her tied up in an outhouse, a problem to be disposed of later. One day, he's given a specimen of the finest quality. He works with numbers, consignments, processing.
This provocative, sorrowful novel expertly wields a double-edged cleaver: when Marcos points out that 'in the end, meat is meat, it doesn’t matter where it’s from', it’s a statement of both dystopic extremity and banal everyday fact.If everyone was eating human meat, would you? 'HIDEOUS, BOLD, UNFORGETTABLE' i-D MAGAZINE 'A THRILLING DYSTOPIA EVERYONE SHOULD READ' DAZED 'GUT-CHURNING, BRILLIANTLY REALISED' DAILY MAIL Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans - only no one calls them that. But if this is a fable about the inadequacy of language in the face of darkness, it also resonates with sadness at the prospect of the silence humans can expect when we are alone in the world, in the wake of mass extinctions. In a narrative otherwise so blunt and blood-spattered, he piles metaphor on simile as he tries to convey the weight of others’ words. Marcos’s main obsession is not flesh but language: how we construct the world out of words, how we speak the unspeakable, and how we negotiate the gap between words and reality. the metaphorical equivalence with factory farming is blatant, served up to us with relish. If Marcos’s recap of the Transition and its ethical doublethink is sometimes heavy-footed, the brusque, declarative narration and matter-of-fact staccato sentences are horribly effective. The conveyer-belt pacing therefore feels intentional: Our murderous wrongs are repeated, and repeated, and to look away is to refuse, deliberately, to bear witness. Her new world order isn’t so much woven into story as it is planted in front of us like a gravestone. Of course, Bazterrica isn’t writing a pamphlet. If Bazterrica had stopped here, she’d still have crafted one of the most potent indictments since Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju’s palate-killing 1949 documentary about Paris slaughterhouses. There really is no debate here our process of mechanizing meat production is morally appalling. It’s surprising, though it shouldn’t be, how easy it is to critique our real-life factory-farm processes by mentally swapping a human for a pig or cow. Because of its banal and miserable tone, given a muscular translation by Sarah Moses, Tender Is the Flesh - which won Argentina’s Premio Clarin de Novela - is, at least in spates, more powerful than either forebear.
The setup sounds like the Charlton Heston teeth-gnasher Soylent Green mated to Anthony Burgess’s satirical novel The Wanting Seed, yet the prose feels like neither. Bazterrica’s interest is less in near-future world-building than in reflecting our grisly present.
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