Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is about a world in which a devastating virus, deadly to humans, has made all other animals inedible. In desperation, the world has legalized and regulated cannibalism. We experience this world through Marcos’ eyes. Alongside the horrors of cannibalism, human trafficking, and human experimentation, Marcos deals with his own personal struggles of a son dead from SIDS, a wife who’s left him, and a father who has slipped into dementia. His life is irrevocably complicated by the gift of a First Generation Pure female.
The novel reads in a straight-forward, journalistic way that echoes the brutality of its content. I’m reminded of the stark prose of stories like The Jungle, which I read excerpts of in high school, and American Psycho, which I read excerpts of in college.
One of the most interesting things about Tender is the Flesh is that the narrative only ever refers to Marcos as “he.” Other characters call him by his name or a variation of it. It could be an aspect of the translation by Sarah Moses (the novel was originally written in Spanish), but I don’t think so. Instead, I think it’s more likely Bazterrica’s choice to show how dehumanizing the world has become, even for the “dominant” people.
It’s not an easy read, but an interesting one. I can’t say that I enjoyed it, but I don’t think we’re meant to. But it gave me a lot to think about, stuff that I think is worth thinking about.
Many years ago, I was on a panel about Dystopian Fiction as a genre. One of my fellow panelists made the observation that dystopian fiction is always about a current society carried to the extreme. It was one of those moments of such obviousness that I felt utterly stupid for never having thought of it–or at least, not in those terms. Of course, that’s informed my reading of dystopian fiction ever since.
Through the narrative, we see the legal regulations of “special meat.” For a system that literally chews people up, there are a lot of rules that govern who can be eaten. This reminded me of the legality of such immoral systems as American chattel slavery and Nazi programs of extermination–both executed according to existing laws at the time–and accepted systems of current exploitation such as prison labor and modern capitalism.
Consider a tragedy that occurs near the end of the story. A truck that’s carrying a load of head (humans meant to be eaten) is attacked by Scavengers, a group of humans who live outside the rules and regulations of modern society. The focus of the tragedy is not the truckload of humans that are slaughtered and cannibalized–that’s what was going to happen anyway–but the death and cannibalization of the truck’s driver, Luisito. The aftermath of the tragedy is a discussion between Marcos and his boss about how to deal with the Scavengers in a clandestine way that doesn’t have legal consequences. The whole scene is handled in six pages of story and, at the end of it, Marcos “wants to pity the Scavengers and be sorry about Luisito’s fate, but he doesn’t feel a thing.” The story has dehumanized Marcos as much as it has the “special meat.”
I’ve been wrestling with how I feel about the ending since I finished the story. In the second half of the story, after a bizarre eight month time jump, Marcos is shown to have formed a relationship with the female he was given at the start of the story. He’s brought her into his house, named her Jasmine, and spends as much time as he can with her, caring for her. But he’s done this after raping and impregnating her. I wanted to believe that Jasmine had become Marcos’s redemption for his participation in a system that he’s shown to dislike from the beginning of the story. But after Jasmine gives birth and Marcos is reunited with his wife, alienated since the death of their son, Marcos kills Jasmine and is going to slaughter her for her meat to hide the illegality of what he’s done.
I felt betrayed by Marcos’s actions. But I had to remind myself that, even though he’s shown to dislike the system of legal cannibalism, he doesn’t do anything meaningful to change it. In the end, the systems that bind us are guarded by its prisoners.
