Tender Is The Flesh – Agustina Bazterrica

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Chosen by Rachel

Dystopian fiction about a world where humans are farmed for meat after animals become diseased and unfit for consumption. Told through the eyes of Marcos, a slaughterhouse official, who is disgusted at what society has become but remains stuck in the cogs of ultimate control. A metaphorical look at how groups in society “consume” one another through dehumanisation.

Don’t be an idiot. Can’t you see they’re controlling us? If we eat each other, they control overpopulation, poverty, crime. Do you want me to keep going? I mean, it’s obvious.

● Agustina Bazterrica has written about her disgust at consumerism and capitalism and how groups in society are willing to objectify and depersonalise each other for power and control. The message is portrayed in the most graphic of ways with detailed passages of human beings being treated as “meat”: on ropes in the barn, slaughtered at the abattoir, hunted for sport, sacrificed for religious reasons, experimented on in laboratories, eaten alive, stolen from mortuaries. The content in this book is the most disturbing I have come across; sometimes it was distressing to even look at the words. But beneath the horror is a well constructed and poignant story making this one of the best and one of the worst books I’ve read. I enjoyed the complexity of Marcos, someone who can reveal the horrors of “transition” to us in honest accounts but who is still willing to manipulate the system for his own benefit. And I loved the ending – horrifically perfect. – Rachel

● I found this novel very disturbing, and even more so knowing that every horrific treatment being meted out on the fictional humans (or ‘head’) is regularly administered to animals in real life. Even though promoting animal rights wasn’t the author’s primary motivation, I deeply appreciated a book highlighting the realities of slaughterhouses and scientific testing on live subjects. Was this an incredible book? Yes. Would I recommend it to anyone other than my worst enemy? No. – Suzy

● I have never read such a disturbing, disgusting, relentlessly horrifying but truly fascinating book as this one. I dreaded picking it up each night but once I was reading I couldn’t put it down! Cannibalism is not a new literary topic so this in itself wasn’t a particularly hard thing to stomach. But what was difficult to read, was the farming and commercialism of humans as meat for consumption and the horrifying way this was executed. If you do decide to read this book, be prepared to have your mind blown! – Jodie

● I’ve never read anything as horrific but fascinating as Tender Is The Flesh. I would think I’d reached the pinnacle of horror as each chapter finished, but the horrors just kept coming. Eating people is not the worst part either, it’s only the beginning. It is all the awful infrastructure around it and details of all the hideous things you can, apparently, do with a human that makes it truly disturbing. Yet, I couldn’t stop reading – this book is a real page turner. I’m still thinking about it, especially how people can live in a society lacking in basic humanity. – Jo

Published in Spanish 2017
Translated into English by Sarah Moses 2020
Scribner
209 pages