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Tender Is the Flesh di Agustina Bazterrica
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Tender Is the Flesh (edizione 2020)

di Agustina Bazterrica (Autore)

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1,843609,101 (3.85)43
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he's aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost--and what might still be saved.… (altro)
Utente:burritapal
Titolo:Tender Is the Flesh
Autori:Agustina Bazterrica (Autore)
Info:Scribner (2020), 224 pages
Collezioni:La tua biblioteca, In lettura
Voto:*****
Etichette:Nessuno

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Tender Is the Flesh di Agustina Bazterrica

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» Vedi le 43 citazioni

Not for the faint of heart…what creeped me out more than anything is that the story wasn’t so unbelievable. The author doesn’t really hold back which made for an incredibly intense read…like something you’re disturbed by but for some reason you can’t look away. ( )
  jbrownleo | Mar 27, 2024 |
Good, but a bit too short. Almost as soon as real conflict appears it's resolved and the book is over. ( )
  RepentantErasmus | Mar 21, 2024 |
Marcos is the son of a butcher whose primary focus, right now, is ensuring that his father, who has dementia, gets the care he needs and is respectfully cremated after his death. In this new world, where an infectious virus has supposedly made all animal meat and products poisonous to humans, it's not an easy goal. Meat for human consumption is supposed to come from genetically modified head, bred to age faster, or from First Generation Pure (FGP) head. Special meat isn't supposed to have a name, but it's not unheard of for deceased people to end up sold on the black market, and Marcos wants to make sure that never happens to his father.

We're given detailed descriptions of what Marcos' job at a meat processing plant is like, as he talks to tanners, breeders, and others his company works with, and gives potential new hires a tour of his plant. He can barely stomach this work anymore, to the point that he secretly stops eating meat altogether, and it nearly pushes him over the edge when a client gifts him an FGP female.

In case my description didn't make it clear, this book is set in a world where humans eat other humans. It's very clearly a message about the horrors of the meat industry, and it might have been more effective if I weren't a genre reader who found myself constantly questioning the world of this book.

It didn't make any sense. Marcos and others strongly suspected that the virus that supposedly made all animal meat poisonous to humans was, in fact, a government conspiracy to reduce overpopulation. There was no believable explanation for why so many believed in the virus to the point of killing all nearby animals, including zoo animals and beloved pets, and the author paid zero attention to the ecological damage that this wholesale slaughter would have caused. Readers were also supposed to believe that the majority of people would accept "special meat" made out of humans as replacement for animal meat. The world-building was vague at best, dependent on the book's frequent on-page cruelties to keep readers from noticing.

The story was populated by hordes of voiceless victims (literally, in the case of the people bred and raised to be meat - their vocal cords were removed) surrounded by monsters. Reading this was like watching a long string of torture porn-style ads supposedly meant to raise awareness about animal cruelty.

On the plus side, finishing this means that I'm prepared for my next book club meeting, and I'm sure our discussion will be interesting.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )
  Familiar_Diversions | Mar 17, 2024 |
3.5? Honestly, the lengths people will go to not to be vegetarian. ( )
  KallieGrace | Feb 27, 2024 |
If you believe animals should have the same rights to life as humans, and thus we should stop eating meat, what's one way you could try to advance your philosophical argument? You could write a novel based on your belief that the rights of cows/pigs/chickens = the rights of humans, there's no rightful difference between us, by substituting humans into the meat processing chain in place of cows/pigs/chickens and showing what that would look like. Why not?

Bazterrica, in a column she wrote for the Irish Times, lays it out thusly:
Thanks to my own reading on the topic I gradually changed my diet and I stopped eating meat. When I did, a veil was drawn, and my view of meat consumption was completely changed. To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse. One day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, “Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.” And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.


To create such a scenario, Tender Is the Flesh posits a virus that infects all animals except humans, only being transmissible to humans by our physical contact with animals or any of their byproducts like eating meat or wearing leather, and invariably being fatal in that event. True, this is scientifically absurd, so the novel also suggests that this virus is a lie created by global governments, corporations, media, and medical institutions and doctors so we'll eat humans to reduce problems of overpopulation, poverty, undesirables, etc. This is even more absurd.

But let's say we simply grant the premise for the sake of the novel's experiment. Nothing wrong with that, we do the same for plenty of speculative fictions.

The first third of the book, maybe even a little more, is very heavy on narrative exposition. It plants a few seeds of the eventual story, but mostly it is giving the reader background information for it. There is a lot of sentence construction that begins, "He remembers..." and that goes on to give flat reportage of past events. There is a long section where the process of meat processing, from the unloading of live subjects to their preparation for slaughter to the actual slaughter to the carving up of the body is given through dialogue between characters in instructional format.

Not great. To me this is indicative of this book being more a polemical work than one concerned with the craft of fiction. It's more a thought experiment than a story.

However, on the positive side, the novel does pick up later. The protagonist, a manager in a meat processing plant, is given a gift of a young woman bred for consumption who has been treated accordingly all her life, much as we currently treat pigs bred for slaughter. He has also recently lost his young infant through sudden death syndrome. This creates a scenario brimming with possibilities, which I'll just say are developed and concluded with real bravura.

Bazterrica is also concerned with language, and how words are used and what sort of effects they have based on the intentions behind their crafting. Words are powerful and their regulation, which ones we're allowed to use and which ones we aren't in given situations, matters.

He wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism to Senor Urami. He wishes these words could rip open the man's smile, perforate the regulated silence, compress the air until it chokes both of them. But he remains silent and smiles.


This is a book a lot of readers will have trouble making it through, which I think is both the author's point and what will limit her success at making it. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
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» Aggiungi altri autori

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Agustina Bazterricaautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Aaltonen, EinariTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Moses, SarahTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Nguyen Béraud, MargotTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Strobel, MatthiasTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
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For my brother, Gonzalo Bazterrica
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Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he's aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost--and what might still be saved.

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Media: (3.85)
0.5 1
1 8
1.5 4
2 25
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3 52
3.5 19
4 145
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