Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.
Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

I knew about this book for a while, but I wasn’t sure it was going to be my cup of tea. I finally bit the bullet when it was one of the October books for Bookake.

I think this was an ambitious premise, but it lacked execution both regarding worldbuilding and character development. It somehow feels like an expanded short story, with an abrupt end, typical of short stories.

What happened during the Transition? Who were the first human beings that were destined to become food? Were they the result of pure genetic engineering or just the result of selective breeding? Were they really as dumb as presented in the book, or was this a result of a process over several generations? The book doesn’t answer any of these questions, and it presents us with that world with little scaffolding to support the main story. Most people are fine with the new world order, but our protagonist doesn’t seem to be. We only get very brief mentions of how people somehow got to accept this new situation, but I wonder why only our main character seemed to have issues with it.

Marcos, the main character, is presented as a morally ambiguous figure in a world where morality has lost its meaning. I don’t want to give much away about the story, but apart from being horrendous, cruel, and generally unpleasant to read, it presented a hopeless present and future.

I can’t help but think that this thought-provoking tale could have been much more than it really was. I wasn’t able to relate to any of the characters; they lacked depth, and even Marcus felt like a plot device, presenting a dystopian society that didn’t feel real enough to care about.

For similar themes, I find the Unwind Dystology by Neal Shusterman much more compelling, where one can relate to the characters and feel the consequences of an upside-down world.

Story (Plot)
Overall:

lomeraniel

My name is Elena. Since I was a little child I loved science fiction and fantasy, and I can’t resist a good novel. In 2015, while wait I started to listen to audiobooks and I discovered the pleasure in being able to read while doing my daily tasks, so there’s always an audiobook playing on my phone. If you see me with my Bluetooth headphones on, please be gentle, I get easily startled.

I live with my boyfriend, which I met during my six-year stay in Belgium, four cockatiels, eight lovebirds, and a hamster in Madrid, Spain; and I like to spend my free time knitting and sewing while listening to audiobooks.