Paper Cuts: Tender Is the Flesh

Special meat. That’s what the world calls human flesh in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a gripping, grisly story intimately concerned with the bestowing and revocation of humanity. A “head”, as the novel refers to domesticated humans bred and slaughtered for their meat, is not a person. Referring to one as a human being, we soon learn, carries stiff social and legal consequences. And what constitutes the line between these groups? As Bazterrica reminds us again and again with sledgehammer force, it’s a matter of convenience, desire, and pure confabulation. Humanity rests where power wants it to rest and departs where power wishes it to depart. From the hateful vapidity of Marcos’ suburbanite sister, Marisa, to the urbane monstrosity of the Eastern European aristocrat who owns a game preserve supplied by Marcos’ company, every segment of society has its own particular way of playing this game. Denial. Self-distraction. The leveraging of pre-existing prejudices to maintain an emotional distance from the repellent nature of society’s new cannibalistic norms.

Of course, as Bazterrica subtly but repeatedly reminds us, these norms aren’t really new at all. We’ve been sucking value out of the bodies of the oppressed for millennia now, and our ability to look the other way while filling our bellies with the products of exploitation and brutality is both well-honed and deeply ingrained. We are a species of cannibals. Our empires are built on the bones of the dead and nourished by their enslaved and butchered young. We suck the marrow from the bones of our inferiors while concocting elaborate philosophies to affirm our innocence. Perhaps, Bazterrica’s characters muse, the powers that be were simply weary of performing so much work to abstract their murderous actions. Perhaps the mysterious virus the world’s governments claim necessitated the destruction of most wild and domestic animals was only a pretext to put older pretexts aside. 

Bazterrica’s prose is sparse and clinical, almost dissociative, and her protagonist is an almost Sartre-esque figure, moving through life in a fog of daydreaming nausea. The world repulses him. He mourns the death by SIDS of his infant son while daily buying and selling living human beings for their meat. That he works with a German logistics expert named Krieg operating in Argentina can hardly be an accident. As the bare but gruesomely compelling plot narrows in on a conclusion inevitable in hindsight but breathtakingly ghastly in the moment, we begin to realize that Marcos’ nausea will not translate into insight or action, that his knowledge of the moral stakes of the world in which he finds himself gives him no special resilience against its poison. The final scene and line are such a masterpiece of ghoulish, nightmarish perfection as to beggar belief. A stronger contender for the decade’s high water mark in literary horror I haven’t yet seen.