Tender is The Flesh — book review
This review contains spoilers.
Earlier this year, I came across Tender is The Flesh book discussion on horrorlit subreddit. A translated novel that had provoked strong mixed reactions among readers between high praise and immense dissatisfaction, and before I tell you where i fit in let's look at the novel itself.
Tender is The Flesh is a relatively short novel, written by the Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica. In this book Bazterrica explores themes such as etchis, morality, and dehumanization.
Tender is The Flesh can be summarized as such:
"After it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition“; where eating human meat dubbed as special meat is legal.
Marcos Tejos, a former butcher kid, now works at a meat processing plant, where they grow humans as mindless animals to slaughter or sell.
His wife has left him after they lost their son, his father is sinking into dementia and rotting away in a nursing home. Marcos despises his job but feels he has to keep the position in order to care for his father and rebuild his marriage.
One day, Marcos receives a gift; a livestock of the finest quality. But instead of butchering her, he develops a forbidden relationship with her.”
The premise may not give anything away or sound that compelling to read, but Tender is The Flesh is gruesome from the very beginning of the novel.
In the novel, all animal meat has been rendered inedible due to a virus that kills humans upon consumption. Hence humans simply decided to consume each other. Welcome to normalized and legalized cannibalism.
While I haven't been all that disturbed by all the gore in the book, what really impacted me was how easy it was to cast and reduce somebody to a 'head', 'male', or 'female'.
The writing style is terrifically sterile and very matter of fact distant, a tone that perfectly matched the world of the dehumanizing effect of referring to other people as head or special meat.
Not much happens for the first half of the book, that is until Marcos is gifted a female FGP (a premium quality head) for his own personal use.
In a lot of discussion threads I saw people stating how shocked they were that he ended up killing her because it seemed that he loved her. But I found it truly horrific how Marcos treated Jasmine.
The moment he receives her, he ties her up in the barn and keeps there, sleeping in her own filth. And once he notices that she is attractive, he slightly improves her conditions and later on rapes her.
Even when he moves her into his house he still treats her in a dehumanizing way. She is locked away in a room where he can watch her. Jasmine has essentially been upgraded from pet to incubator and Marcos doesn't care about her beyond that, all he sees in her is the opportunity to rebuild his family and get the son that he lost.
There were a lot of clues scattered throughout the novel on Jasmine's demise, but what truly cemented it for me was when he ate the meat plated for him at the hunting game resort.
Marcos never saw Jasmine as a human and when his purpose for her was achieved he killed her.
“She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
Bazterrica did a fantastic job to show how this dehumanization phenomenon spreads. Kids finding humor in guessing how people would taste like, the scavengers talked about as if they are mere animals, sex trafficking rose as society gets more comfortable with seeing humans as a product. The scene when the guy talks about eating a trafficked girl was especially hard to stomach (pun intended, sorry). Even celebrities are not spared once they have nothing to show off.
That being said, I unfortunately struggled with the plot of the novel. Bazterrica introduced a lot of different characters and backstories just to never mention them after that, those characters were mainly for shock value and had nothing to offer to the main plot.
Around 80% of the book can be categorized as :
- Marcos' reflection about his relationships, his sister who he hates, his wife who left him when they lost their child, his father who's in a nursing home due to his deteriorating mental health.
- Marcos' engagement with different characters. We have the game hunters who hunt indebted celebrities before feasting on them, the skin connoisseur, the creepy guy who applied at the processing plant, the weird church who sends people to be butchered for reasons I have yet to understand. The scientist whose experiments are simply for torture, honestly what is the point of introducting this award winning scientist just for her to end up working on building safer cars when this is already been done?.
Some of these instances managed to drag this read for me while making everything absurd and boring at the same time. I personally would love it if they were explored fully to add depth to the story.
My dissatisfaction with Tender is The Flesh is that it really didn't say anything about a lot of topics it glossed over. There is no real message about the meat industry, or family dynamics. I finished the book feeling really unfulfilled and like none of that 80% of the story meant anything.
Anyone have a different experience with the novel? I'd really be interested to hear your take.
