The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.
With the emergence of a deadly, incurable virus within animals, humanity has turned to cannibalism to satiate its hunger for meat. Now, the field of slaughtering and domesticating humans is a large one, and Marcos is considered an expert in it.
Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh is a gruesome yet compelling satire on themes of classism, the meaning of life, and the extent of conformity. In all its brutal, visceral, and bold glory, it’s horrible yet thought-provoking, quietly bitter yet intense.
Sarah Moses’s translation of this book captured a disturbing edge to it. The use of dehumanizing language to describe cannibalism—from “special meat” to merely “product”—adds to the terrifying essence of conformity and the ignorance of humanity. Terrible, gory scenes are described in detail, almost with a certain passiveness to them. In Bazterrica’s dystopian world, people have become desensitized to what constitutes a human, turning a blind eye to the factory-bred because they cannot possibly be human.
It seems to me that this is the attitude with which Marcos navigates the story. Marcos is an anti-hero; while his struggles and pains allow us a momentary connection to the character, we’re shown that he’s no different from others who are so obviously dislikeable. That’s when we realize that the narrative we’ve been following is unreliable: for the normal person, what is seen as evil from the outside always has a motive from the inside, however justifiable or not. Yet Marcos did not notice this; he carries himself with a certain ego, morally placing himself above the others: his sister, his boss, and the people who eat the special meat. He doesn’t consider that he is evil; he operates on his pains and motives. He’s not above the system; he’s just one of the many that’s tied into it.
Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.
~4 stars.
